Lorca defended the company in interviews. He told journalist Juan Chabás that no professional troupe could rival La Barraca. He praised the intelligence and enthusiasm of his young actors. “What’s more,” he said, “by dint of all these rehearsals and experiences, I feel I’m turning into a stage director. It’s a long and difficult process.” Chabás asked if Lorca’s directorial work kept him from writing. “Not at all,” Lorca said. “I’m working a great deal. Right now I’m about to finish Yerma, my second tragedy.” He intended to give the Spanish theater “tragedies,” he said, because “our theatrical tradition demands it.” He insisted that directing did not distract him from writing. “It’s all the same! Everything becomes the joy of creating, of making things.”
In late July, Lorca went home to the Huerta de San Vicente in Granada to celebrate his saint’s day. He remained in Granada for a couple of weeks, basking in the silence of the vega and the scent of jasmine that enveloped his family’s summer home. During his stay he put the finishing touches to Yerma, his tragedy about a childless woman. He told a friend he had already begun planning his next drama, Doña Rosita the Spinster. He hoped to finish the second play after La Barraca’s visit to Santander. “Since I’ve got it all thought out, it will only take me a few days’ work,” he said.
On July 17, the day before his saint’s day, one of Lorca’s oldest friends, Paquito Soriano Lapresa, died from a sudden illness. He was thirty-nine. Lorca had known Soriano since adolescence, when both were members of the Rinconcillo. The eccentric only son of a wealthy Granada family, Soriano had shared Lorca’s impish sense of fun (he once wore a green pepper on his nose during Carnival) and his fondness for romantic music and the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez. Lorca had dedicated a chapter of Impressions and Landscapes to “Paquito Soriano, exotic and admirable spirit.” At thirty-six, he was devastated to learn of Soriano’s death. “You can well imagine the grief we, his friends, have endured,” he told Rafael Martínez Nadal that August. “One of the most wonderful men I’ve ever known has died.”
Three days after Soriano’s death, the Defensor de Granada announced the birth of Concha García Lorca’s third child, a daughter, Lorca’s second niece. Although he had long viewed birth and death as inextricable halves of a single whole, Lorca had seldom witnessed so dramatic a confluence of the two. As he rejoiced in his niece’s birth, he mourned his friend’s death, and vice versa. Sometime that summer—very probably in the last week of July and first two weeks of August—he composed a number of new poems in which he explored the bonds between birth, death, and love. By fall, Lorca had begun to think of these individual poems—together with a sprinkling of works written in 1931, and the poems he had composed in April 1934 during his voyage home from Argentina—as a unified collection, one loosely based on traditional Arab verse forms.
He called the collection The Divan at Tamarit—“divan” from the Persian diwan, meaning an anthology of verse, and “Tamarit” from the proper Arab name his uncle Francisco had given to his country home, the Huerta de Tamarit, located a few hundred yards from the Huerta de San Vicente. Lorca so loved his uncle’s whitewashed house that he described it as “a collection of post card pictures,” and told a cousin who lived there, “You must never, never sell it. I want it for myself.” He thought its address “the prettiest” in the world: “Huerta del Tamarit, Término de Fargui, Granada.”
By choosing to associate The Divan at Tamarit with Arab verse forms, Lorca was giving voice to ideas and images that had absorbed him since childhood. He had read Arab poetry in his teens, and in his twenties had talked of dedicating an issue oí gallo to “the Arabic poets of the Alhambra.” “When our coplas reach the very extremes of Pain and Love,” he had said in his lecture on Gypsy deep song, “they become linked expressively with the magnificent verses of Arab and Persian poets.” He particularly admired the sensuality of Arab verse.
His interest in the form was part of a widespread revival of interest in Arab culture in the early 1930s in Spain. By 1934 the University of Granada had inaugurated a School of Arab Studies aimed at promoting the study of the region’s Arab heritage. Lorca knew at least one member of the school’s faculty, Emilio García Gómez, a scholar of Arab literature whose influential anthology of Arab-Andalusian poetry, Poemas arábigos-andaluces, published in 1930, had introduced many Spaniards to the extravagant metaphors and exotic language of Arab verse. In the summer of 1934, García Gómez told Lorca that he intended to devote his next book to Ibn Zamrak, the poet whose work adorned the walls of the Alhambra. Lorca countered by announcing that he intended to publish his own homage to the poets who once inhabited Arab Granada, The Divan at Tamarit.
Although he failed to issue the collection in 1934, Lorca did deliver a manuscript of the work to his friend Antonio Gallego Burín, who promised to publish the book through the auspices of the University of Granada. García Gómez agreed to contribute an introduction to the volume. The finished collection numbered twenty poems. Lorca divided these into two, roughly equal sections of “ghazals” and “qasidas,” poems dimly based on traditional Middle Eastern verse forms. Like their ancient Persian counterparts, Lorca’s “ghazals” dwell principally on love and sex, while his “qasidas”—historically a longer, metrically more complex form—focus chiefly on death. But throughout the collection love and death intermingle. The volume as a whole, one of the most intricate and fully realized of Lorca’s poetic endeavors, offers a profound meditation on the constant exchange between the living and the dead, between earth and the cosmos.
Set in Granada, and written mostly in conventional metrical forms, the Divan differs markedly from the free verse and urban imagery of its most immediate predecessor, the verse collection he eventually titled Poet in New York, although both works stress Lorca’s morbid awareness of death, pain, and the futility of human desire. Poet in New York had revived his earlier conviction that place is inseparable from personal dilemmas. In the Divan, the poet’s affection for Granada—a trait he shares with his Arab forebears—is central. Lorca writes of the city’s gardens, sky, and omnipresent water, of its pale ruins, and of the sensual abandon that distinguishes Granada from its more earthbound Andalusian neighbors, Córdoba and Seville.
Some poems are short and songlike; others are densely phrased and heavily symbolic; still others employ an erratic free verse. Together they trace the course of an archetypal love affair, from its first pulse to its eventual consummation, dissolution, and aftermath. Through his unnamed protagonist, Lorca hints at his own experience of love, and gives voice to his most enduring preoccupations, while at the same time rendering homage to the city of his youth and its glorious past.
The Divan is both more personal and more erotic than any collection Lorca had written to date. Many poems bear veiled allusions to homosexual love, and suggest Lorca’s growing desire both to acknowledge and celebrate his sexuality. The book’s opening work, “Ghazal of Love Unforeseen,” is emblematic of the whole. The four-stanza poem, one of the most explicitly carnal in the Divan, boldly envisions a sudden passionate encounter between the poet and his beloved, drawing links between their contemporary night of “unforeseen” love, with its “thousand Persian ponies,” and the tales in the Thousand and One Nights, where nights of new love are threatened by death:
No one understood the perfume, ever:
the dark magnolia of your belly.
No one ever knew you martyred
love’s hummingbird between your teeth.
A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep
in the moonlit plaza of your brow,
while four nights through I bound
your waist, the enemy of snow.
The poet dreams of a lasting emotional commitment (“I searched my breast to give you / the ivory letters saying: Ever”), but it is not to be, and in the aftermath of his failed affair, he suffers with biblical grandeur:
Ever, ever, my agony’s garden,
your elusive form forever:
b
lood of your veins in my mouth,
your mouth now lightless for my death.
In much of the Divan, the protagonist meets a similar fate. Love seems always to evaporate; only suffering endures. The pattern is circular: the agony of existence and certainty of death lead the poet to seek both comfort and oblivion in the act of love; and yet love invariably disappoints, or fails, thereby reminding him of death and of the agony of existence. In “Ghazal of the Love That Hides from Sight,” Lorca’s protagonist engages in an affair with a lover whose name he does not even bother to learn: “I burned in your body / without knowing whose it was.” In “Ghazal of the Memory of Love,” he seeks to retain his painful memories of a doomed relationship—memories that, paradoxically, assure him he is alive:
Don’t take your memory with you.
Leave it alone in my breast,
a shudder of cherry trees
in white January martyrdom.
A wall of bad dreams
divides me from the dead.
Everywhere, love and sex—especially heterosexual, procreative sex—lead to death. The male speaker of “Qasida of the Woman Prone” envisions a pregnant woman whose “womb is a struggle of roots. / Your lips are a dawn without contour. / Under the lukewarm roses of the bed / the dead men moan, awaiting their turn.” The familiar motif of a drowned child returns in “Ghazal of the Dead Child,” where the literal death of a child becomes the figurative death of childhood, and drowning and lovemaking are indistinguishable. Both lead to death:
No crumb of cloud remained on the land
when you were drowning in the river.
A giant of water fell down the mountains
and the valley rolled by with irises and dogs.
Your body, shadowed violet by my hands,
dead on the bank, was an archangel of cold.
In one poem after another, human existence—birth, life, love, sex, time, death—dissolves into nothingness. Faced with the void, the poet resigns himself to extinction and asks only for what he cannot have: a helping hand to ease him through the last hours of life. “I want nothing else, only a hand,” Lorca writes in “Qasida of the Impossible Hand”:
a wounded hand, if possible.
I want nothing else, only a hand,
though I spend a thousand nights without a bed.
It would be a pale lily of lime,
a dove tethered fast to my heart.
It would be the guard who, on the night of my death,
would block entrance absolutely to the moon.
I want nothing else, only that hand,
for the daily unctions and my agony’s white sheet.
I want nothing else, only that hand,
to carry a wing of my own death.
Everything else all passes away.
Now blush without name. Perpetual star.
Everything else is something else: sad wind,
while the leaves flee, whirling in flocks.
Lorca returned to Madrid in early August. He planned to leave the capital Saturday evening, August 11, and travel with La Barraca to Santander, on the north coast of Spain, for a weeklong series of performances at the International University. Several of Lorca’s colleagues, including the poet Jorge Guillén, were already in Santander for the summer university term.
That Saturday afternoon, in a bullring in the small town of Manzanares, south of Madrid, Lorca’s friend Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, who had recently returned to the ring, was gored by a bull named Granadino. Sánchez Mejías received superficial treatment in a local infirmary and was transported by ambulance to Madrid. He arrived in the capital early Sunday morning, August 12, bleeding profusely. Despite transfusions and surgery, gangrene set in, and the bullfighter fell into a delirium. He died at 9:45 a.m. on Monday, August 13. He was forty-three.
The instant he heard about his friend’s injury, Lorca canceled his travel plans and remained in Madrid to monitor his condition. Because of the gravity of his injuries, friends were not allowed to visit the bullfighter in the hospital but had to rely instead on periodic reports from his doctors. By phone, Lorca conveyed the details to his colleagues in Santander. “Operation.” “Transfusion.” “They’re doing everything they can,” he told Jorge Guillén.
And then, in a hoarse, barely audible voice: “They say he’s lost. Gangrene.”
Shortly before 10 a.m. on August 13, Lorca telephoned Guillén a last time. “It’s over. Ignacio died at a quarter to ten. I’m leaving for Santander. I refuse to see it!”
Lorca arrived in Santander that evening and shut himself away with friends—Guillén, Pedro Salinas, Gerardo Diego, and others—to mourn the bullfighter they had all known and loved. Most, like Lorca, had met Sánchez Mejías for the first time in 1927, during the Góngora Tricentennial in Seville. Then, and subsequently, Sánchez Mejías had endeared himself to them by his exuberant embrace of their work, his love of popular music, and his own “valiant” (as Lorca phrased it) attempts at playwriting. He had retired from bullfighting in 1927 in order to devote himself to a fledgling literary career. Seven years later he announced his return to the ring. Friends tried to dissuade him. But Sánchez Mejías persisted, impelled in part by financial necessity. Older, heavier, and in generally poor shape, he squeezed back into his gaudy uniforms, and in the summer of 1934 made five successful appearances in the ring before going to Manzanares on August 11.
Lorca worshiped him. He had followed his friend’s literary career with interest and admiration, and in recent years had spent a great deal of time with the bullfighter and his companion, La Argentinita, in Madrid. Lorca regarded Sánchez Mejías as a hero, both in and out of the bullring. Told of his friend’s intent to return to bullfighting in 1934, Lorca remarked soberly to a mutual acquaintance, “Ignacio has just announced his own death to me.” On the day after the bullfighter’s funeral, Lorca strolled quietly through a park in Santander with the French writer and Hispanist Marcelle Auclair. He wondered out loud “through what minuscule chink” Sánchez Mejías had now slipped. After a long pause, he turned to Auclair and said:
Ignacio’s death is like my own death, an apprenticeship for my own death. I feel an astonishing sense of calm. Is it, perhaps, because I intuitively expected it to happen? There are moments when I see the dead Ignacio so vividly that I can imagine his body, destroyed, pulled apart by worms and brambles, and I find only a silence which is not nothingness, but mystery.
By the end of October 1934, Lorca had written a poem—his longest ever—in memory of the bullfighter; his colleague Rafael Alberti had also composed a poetic homage to Sánchez Mejías. Lorca described his own effort as an “elegy I never wanted to write.” He drafted parts of the poem in both Granada and Madrid, and revised the complete work in Pablo Neruda’s home in Madrid. He said later that in writing Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, as he called the work, he hoped both to honor his friend and to reveal the “heroic, pagan, popular, and mystic beauty that exists in the fight between man and bull.” He viewed the bullfight as a sacred, inherently erotic rite, the “public representation of the victory of human virtue over bestial instinct.” At once clear and hermetic, disciplined and free, Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías is the work of a writer at the peak of his technical and imaginative maturity. It is the culmination of Lorca’s trajectory as an elegiac poet—a keenly felt homage to a close friend as well as a formal lamentation for a tragic hero, an everyman whose epic death demands a Homeric response.
Each of the work’s four sections strikes a distinctive tone and tempo; the work as a whole functions both as a single entity and as a suite of interconnected poems reflecting the poet’s complex response to his friend’s death, and his thoughts on death in general. It offers little in the way of celebration or consolation, and as such is more properly a lament, with roots in ancient Greek and Roman texts, than an elegy. The bullfighter’s sacrificial death leads to extinction, not salvation. And yet because he has chosen to confront, rather than flee, his inevitable end, Sá
nchez Mejías is a hero.
Lorca relished the ceremony of the bullfight, its “sacred rhythm.” “In it,” he said, “everything is measured, even anguish and death itself.” Although he understood little about actual bullfights (“What are they doing now?” he typically asked friends whenever he attended one), he had on several occasions mentioned his desire to write about bullfighting. He had hoped to devote a section of gallo to the art, and in the late 1920s had drafted portions of an “Ode to the Fighting Bull” as well as a brief prose sketch on the two antagonistic “halves” of the bullring. The sketch, “Sun and Shadow,” belonged to a projected Tauromaquia, which Lorca never completed.
He was keenly interested in bullfighting as myth, as a “dark religion” practiced by a nation whose outward contours resemble the hide of a bull, of a “sacrificed animal.” He was familiar with early Iberian and Dionysian bull cults, with the Cretan Minotaur, and with the notion, by then commonplace, of Andalusia as ancient Tartessus, the site of Hercules’ tenth labor: the retrieval of the mythical red bulls of Geryon. Bullfighting’s pagan roots underpin much of the Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, as do its Christian overtones. The bullfight, Lorca believed, is an “authentic religious drama where, as in the Mass, a god is adored and sacrificed.”
The opening section of the poem, “The Goring and the Death,” is in effect a protracted litany, whose incantatory refrain builds in urgency as the clinical details of the bullfighter’s wounding and death unfold:
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