Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  For Lorca, songs brought the past back to life. “While a cathedral is always fastened to its own epoch, giving the evershifting landscape a ceaseless expression of yesterday, a song leaps out of that yesterday into our own moment,” he said. He viewed popular songs as “magnificent poetry.” As he and Angeles Ortiz traveled through Granada province in 1922, the two men, both in their early twenties, bellowed lines of cante back and forth to one another. Brashly, Lorca insisted that he was the better singer, and an amiable rivalry developed. But there was a poignant undercurrent to their game. Weeks earlier, Manolo’s young wife, Paquita, had died following a long illness brought on by the birth of their only child, Isabel Clara, Lorca’s goddaughter. Shattered, Angeles Ortiz had left Madrid and returned home to Granada with his year-old daughter. At night, the artist slept with his arms wrapped around his wife’s death mask. He sometimes sobbed so loudly that his neighbors heard him.

  During their trips in search of cante singers, Lorca watched devotedly over his friend. In February he reported to a mutual acquaintance that although Manolo was now “much calmer,” he had been “in a bad way, because it was all memories.” As they roamed the Andalusian countryside, Lorca was acutely moved by his companion’s grief, all the more so because it underscored the inherent sorrow of the music they were seeking. In subsequent years, he liked to tell about a cante singer named Silverio Franconetti who mourned his son’s death by spending an entire night singing deep song. To Lorca, the story captured the essence of cante jondo.

  Not all Granadans approved of the festival. Informed that city monies were to be used to fund the event, a number of residents sent angry letters to the local newspaper denouncing the project in particular and Gypsy culture in general. Their response reflected a general antagonism in Spain toward traditional Andalusian song and dance. One detractor argued that the competition would be nothing more than a “festival full of dirty straw hats and shabby clothes performed by a bunch of riffraff.”

  Advocates of the competition rallied to its defense. Several citizens submitted letters of support to the local press. The Defensor de Granada published a lengthy justification of the festival by Manuel de Falla, in which the composer reminded naysayers that a cante jondo festival would bring international prestige to their city. In addition to his piece for the newspaper, Falla published an essay in pamphlet form outlining what he believed to be the origins, values, and contemporary significance of deep song.

  Spurred by Falla’s example, Lorca also drafted a lecture on the topic of cante jondo, which he gave late one February night in the Granada Arts Center. At twenty-three, his black hair combed back from his face, he looked more student than teacher. Uncomfortable with the role of lecturer, he warned his audience that his speech—which bore the unimaginative title “Historic and Artistic Importance of the Primitive Andalusian Song Called Deep Song”—was a “poor, badly constructed lecture.” Nevertheless, he hoped his remarks would be sufficiently “luminous and profound” to convince his listeners of deep song’s “marvelous artistic truth.”

  He drew much of his talk directly from Falla’s pamphlet on cante jondo, lifting quotations, phrases, and occasionally whole passages from the composer’s essay. As Falla had done, Lorca outlined the origins and evolution of deep song as he saw them, and discussed the form’s use by contemporary artists. He reiterated Falla’s belief that the most effective means of interpreting traditional material was stylization, not direct imitation. “Nothing but the quintessence and this or that trill for its coloristic effect ought to be drawn straight from the people,” Lorca advised.

  He referred frequently to Falla, whom he called “Maestro Falla,” “the Maestro,” and even “the great Maestro.” His talk was at once a protracted homage to an admired friend and a tribute to the Gypsy music they both loved. And yet the voice was unmistakably Lorca’s. Incapable of delivering a strictly academic lecture, he seasoned his long speech with personal anecdotes and allusions. He described the late Claude Debussy as a musician who early in his career had “engaged in the fight all we young artists must carry on, the fight for what is new and unforeseen, the treasure hunt, in the sea of thought, for inviolate emotion.” He mentioned “the marvelous Omar Khayyam” renounced “the overluxuriant tree” of romanticism, described himself as “an incurable lyricist,” and declared his allegiance to a new aesthetic, one inspired by the brevity and raw emotional power of popular verse.

  His audience applauded warmly throughout the talk. Two days later, the Noticiero Granadino pronounced the event a “grand success,” and subsequently published the lecture in serial form. Equally enthusiastic, the Defensor de Granada hailed this new facet of Lorca’s career. In Madrid, Adolfo Salazar published a short synopsis of the talk in El Sol.

  His debut as a lecturer heightened Lorca’s stature in Granada. But at home the old battles continued. In early February, Lorca confessed to Salazar that he had recently undergone “some family storms,” and although these had died down, he longed to escape to Madrid. He found Granada stifling. From his desk he could see the snowcapped Sierra Nevadas in the distance, but he was weary of “so much beauty.” Granada inspired and at the same time constrained him. By contrast, Madrid—big, noisy, prosaic Madrid—offered the liberty he craved.

  Twice that spring (once by telegram from Luis Buñuel) he received word from the Residencia that a room was waiting for him, but his father refused to let him go. Lorca managed to escape Granada in April for a quick visit to Seville during Holy Week with his brother and Falla, where the trio reveled in the spectacle of the city’s magnificent Easter week processions and listened to more Gypsy song. Otherwise, he stayed put in Granada. He told guitarist Regino Sáinz de la Maza, with whom he had recently struck up a correspondence, that he needed to remain home because he was tackling projects whose “Andalusian character” warranted his being in the south. In addition to his work on the cante jondo festival and his lecture on deep song, he had embarked on a new series of poems, verse that had at first seemed to him “unattainable” but whose “riddles” he had eventually managed to solve. Jubilant, he proclaimed to Sáinz, “Poetry has become master of my soul.”

  He had begun drafting the new series in November 1921 in a blaze of inspiration, completing thirty-two poems in just ten days. By the end of the month he had finished nearly eight additional poems. In early January 1922 he told Adolfo Salazar he was putting the finishing touches—“the little golden roof tiles”—on the series, and hoped to publish it later that year in conjunction with Granada’s cante jondo festival. He called the series “Poem of the Deep Song.”

  The new poems sprang directly from Lorca’s suites of the previous summer and were in fact themselves “suites” linked thematically by the concept of Gypsy deep song. And yet, as Lorca told Salazar, the series was “distinct from the suites, and full of Andalusian implications. Its rhythm is stylized popular, and in it I bring out the old singers and all the fantastic flora and fauna that fills these sublime songs.” The poems were part and parcel of his work on the cante jondo festival. During his search for Gypsy singers, he had occasionally been struck by a particular turn of phrase and, pulling a scrap of paper from his pocket, had paused to scribble a line of verse.

  He sensed that he was on to something new—“another orientation of mine,” he informed Salazar, “and I don’t know yet what to tell you about it … but novelty it has!” In one breath Lorca described the series as both an altarpiece and a jigsaw puzzle. Although its precise nature eluded him, he knew the effort was audacious. He teased Salazar: “If only for its daring I deserve a smile, which you’ll send me right away.” He claimed, inaccurately, that Spanish poets had “never touched this theme.” In fact, a host of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century regional poets had created a dense body of poetry in imitation and celebration of traditional Andalusian folk song, most notably Lorca’s immediate contemporaries Manuel Machado and Francisco Villaespesa, each of whom had sought to evoke Gypsy song through verse. But
their efforts had resulted in modernista pastiches of the form, contrived and melodramatic replications of standard topics and phrases, that simulate the effect of deep song without penetrating its spirit. In his poem “Cante hondo,” Machado dutifully lists, rather than evokes, the components of his source material: “Malagueñas, soleares / and Gypsy siguiriyas… // It is popular wisdom / that contains all wisdom: / to know how to suffer, love, / die and hate.” By contrast, Lorca hoped to effect a radical new synthesis of the traditional and the avant-garde. Stylization, not imitation, was the key to his approach. In his lecture on cante jondo he had argued that artists should never seek to copy the ineffable modulations of traditional material, for “we can do nothing but blur them. Simply because of education.”

  Stirred by the briefness and density of authentic cante, Lorca strove in his new verse to compress language as he had never done before. The resulting poems are even shorter and more enigmatic than his suites, and a far cry from the often self-indulgent lyrics of Book of Poems. In the stark modulations of Gypsy song Lorca had found a new idiom.

  At the heart of the work are four suites he completed in November 1921, each a series of poems based on one of four specific types of Gypsy song: soleá, petenera, siguiriya, and saeta. In mood and subject Lorca’s suites suggest their real-life sources. “Poem of the Soleá” and “Graphic of the Petenera” dwell on death and mourning, as do traditional soleás and peteneras. “Poem of the Gypsy Siguiriya” evokes a form that Lorca described in his lecture on deep song as a lament that begins with “a terrible cry,” then halts, giving way to an “impressive and measured silence.” Lorca’s version of a “Gypsy Siguiriya” includes a poem called “The Silence,” which reads in its entirety:

  Listen, my son, to the silence.

  The undulating silence

  where valleys and echoes slip,

  bending foreheads

  to the ground.

  Listen.

  In “Poem of the Saeta,” a suite inspired by the coplas, or saetas, sung during Andalusia’s Holy Week processions, Lorca summons the ethereal world of Easter week in Seville, the most famous of Spain’s Holy Week celebrations, which he had witnessed that spring in Falla’s company. Transforming its ritual cast of Virgins and hooded penitents into an incongruous set of archetypal figures, he transcends the everyday circumstances of Holy Week to offer a unique vision of Christ’s passion:

  Strange unicorns are advancing

  through the narrow street.

  From what forests of myth,

  from what mythological fields?

  Up close, they’re astronomers,

  fantastic merlins

  and the

  Ecce Homo

  Durandarte bewitched,

  Orlando Furioso.

  Some of his deep-song poems have real-life antecedents: a family anecdote, a scene glimpsed during a Holy Week procession or on a hillside above the Alhambra. (One night as he stood in the Arab fortress gazing at the surrounding landscape, Lorca cried, “The olive trees are opening and closing like a fan!” He worked the phrase into the poem “Landscape” in “Poem of the Gypsy Siguiriya.”) Other works draw on Lorca’s ample knowledge of Andalusian topography and lore. The series pits the Dionysian grandeur of Seville against the mournful beauty of Granada, with its two slender rivers, “one of blood, one of tears. // Ay, the love / that went off on the breeze!”

  Grief, and its progeny, lament, dominate the collection. Lorca writes of the persecuted and disgraced, of desire and despair, of imprisonment and death. He borrows liberally from authentic Gypsy song, sprinkling his deep-song poems with the heartrending Ay’s and plaintive refrains of true cante, thus giving an idea of what it is like to hear cante jondo performed in a cave on Sacromonte hill or in a village square. Through Falla he had learned to draw sparingly on traditional sources, fusing the past to the present through metaphor and in the process creating a mythic Andalusia, a half-real, half-imagined place of epic proportion, where Gypsy singers are blind “like Homer,” and Christ evolves from “Judea’s iris” into “Spain’s carnation.” Even something so humble as a guitar—a common motif in Andalusian poetry—bears novel traces of Calvary: “Oh, guitar! / Heart gravely wounded / by five swords.”

  The Andalusia of Lorca’s deep-song poems is a spiritual as well as a physical entity, a palimpsest of vanished civilizations. In a sense, Lorca was re-creating the Andalusia of his boyhood—a land whose fields held Roman mosaics and Arab towers, Catholic spires and Renaissance palaces. His is an Andalusia of “immense nights” and “deep cisterns,” a “land of arrows / and death without eyes,” an “Andalusia of grief!” where death and love are intertwined:

  Beneath the dry earth

  the hundred lovers sleep

  Andalusia has long, red roads;

  Córdoba, green olive trees,

  a place for a hundred crosses

  to remember

  the hundred lovers

  that forever sleep.

  Martyrs all, Lorca’s Gypsies dream of an impossible love but encounter only death. Their sorrow is ancient, their song primal. In drafting Poem of the Deep Song, Lorca sought to capture the Gypsy world not from the outside, as his predecessors had done, but from within, to suggest rather than to explain. He aimed to create a body of work that Gypsies themselves would find authentic. Metrically irregular, terse, often truncated, his poems give the impression of sung prose. From the lyrical excesses of Book of Poems, to the abbreviated lines of his suites, to the concentrated images and avant-garde sensibility of his deep song poems, Lorca had traveled far. And yet his understanding of human destiny had not changed. “The labyrinths / that time creates / disappear,” he writes in “And After That”:

  (Only the desert

  remains.)

  The heart,

  fount of desire,

  disappears.

  (Only the desert

  remains.)

  The illusion of dawn

  and kisses

  disappear.

  Only the desert,

  the undulating desert,

  remains here.

  Although he completed much of Poem of the Deep Song while preparing for the cante jondo festival in 1922, Lorca did not issue the collection in book form that year, as planned, and the work remained unpublished until 1931, while other projects took precedence. But his deep-song poems did not languish in silence. Lending his husky voice to Spain’s oral tradition, Lorca recited the new works compulsively as he wrote and refined them in the spring of 1922. Friends such as Angeles Ortiz responded warmly to the collection, but Lorca’s best audiences were, as he had hoped, Gypsy singers themselves. When he read Poem of the Deep Song to one group of Gypsies, they were so dazzled by his impassioned performance that afterward they swarmed around him, kissing and hugging him as though he were one of their own.

  To fan interest in the cante jondo festival Lorca gave a public reading of Poem of the Deep Song—his first official poetry recital—in Granada’s opulent Alhambra Palace Hotel on June 7,1922, one week before the competition and two days after his twenty-fourth birthday. Accompanied by two guitarists, one of them a plump young Andalusian named Andrés Segovia, Lorca read his work to a “distinguished and aristocratic” crowd. Local reviewers raved. “Granada has a poet,” exclaimed the Defensor de Granada. “This dreamy young man who is so in love with the beautiful and the sublime will soon be a glory.”

  The following week nearly four thousand people attended Granada’s first Deep Song Competition. The event took place over the course of two nights in the moonlit grounds of the Alhambra. Audiences wore nineteenth-century Andalusian costume: straw hats, embroidered shawls, flounced skirts. Although controversy had continued to rage up to the end, ticket sales were brisk and the event itself was an unrivaled success. Lorca later boasted to a reporter that while watching the competition he kept imagining “all of its detractors sitting off in a corner, biting their fingernails.”

  In his lecture on cante jon
do, he had said that deep song “knows nothing but the night, a wide night steeped in stars,” and this was the case with Granada’s Deep-Song Competition of 1922. The singing began each evening at ten-thirty and lasted until two the following morning. Among the performers were Diego Bermúdez, “El Tenazas,” an old, nearly forgotten singer from Córdoba province, whose formidable voice riveted the crowd, and an eleven-year-old prodigy named Manuel Ortega, “El Caracol,” who later became one of the century’s finest cantores.

  One witness observed that the first Gypsy cry of the competition pierced the night air like a “wound from a traitor’s hand.” A “terrible silence” then descended, followed by another, softer cry. Guitars throbbed and castanets clicked. Gypsies of all ages sang and danced as hundreds of spellbound listeners murmured their approval and clamored for more. Even a downpour on the second night of the competition failed to shatter the spell. People simply covered their heads with their chairs and continued to listen in the rain.

  Reviewing the event for the Noticiero Granadino, Lorca’s Rinconcillo friend Antonio Gallego Burín pronounced the competition a “festival of great Truth.” Word of its success reached as far as Paris and London. Asked by a local journalist to give his opinion of the festival, Lorca replied brightly, “I told you, dear friends, that the Deep Song Competition would be unique.” Its lyricism delighted him. “It was a competition with moonlight and rain. Just like the sun and shadow of the bullfight,” he said.