In this blog post, we examine how Lorca’s Andalusian “han” (grief) is linked to poetic mystery and political tragedy through the rituals of bullfighting and flamenco, as well as the symbols of children and death.
The Poetic World of Lorca’s “Han”
Lorca’s poetry and plays have been widely introduced in Korea. Not only have his poems been translated, but the play ‘Blood Wedding’ has been staged numerous times, and ‘Yerma’ and ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’ have also been performed. I’ve even heard reports that ‘Blood Wedding’ was performed all the way in Spain, but whenever I hear such news, as a scholar who loves Lorca, I feel a sense of unease greater than mere concern. This is because Lorca is a poet whose work possesses a dark side and an obscurity that border on the mysterious, even to Spanish poets and scholars.
Translating and staging Lorca’s poetry or plays can sometimes seem as absurd as conducting a religious service without understanding a thing about the faith. This is because the “Andalusian Duende,” which Lorca held in such high regard, is not merely some deity that bestows a trance-like state. Lorca believed that the worship of the Andalusian Duende originated from the rituals of Dionysus, the god of life, on the distant Greek island of Crete. The sorrow found in bullfighting and flamenco bears a strong resemblance to the festival of death, much like the sacrifice of a lamb in the Dionysian festivals.
Lorca says the following when referring to bullfighting: “It is as if all the true gods of the classical world had suddenly gathered together in this perfect festival (bullfighting). This is because it reveals the great sensibility and culture of a people who discover in humanity the finest rage, the finest courage, and the finest weeping. No one simply enjoys watching Spanish dance or bullfighting. The god of Andalusian ‘han’ makes us feel pain through this tragedy, which is a living embodiment of that god. And it provides a stairway to liberation from the reality that surrounds us.”
Lorca valued an “intimate communion” (comunicación íntima) with the spirit of Andalusia—the god of sorrow—in his poetry and art. He confesses that there was a kind of trance-like, unconscious inspiration in his poetic process. Regarding his poem “Romance of a Nightmare,” he says: “This is a pure act of creation rooted in the soul of Andalusia. Therefore, even for me—the person who conveyed that act and the work—the light can always change and be different. If you were to ask me now why I wrote, ‘Whether thousands or tens of thousands of rays of light or the sound of drums / I was tearing through the dawn,’ my answer would be this: ‘I saw it myself at that moment, directly from the hands of angels and trees.’ But I could not answer any further. Much less could I explain its meaning.”
Lorca was strangely popular. His popularity exploded especially after he published ‘Romancero gitano’ (1928) and received the Spanish National Literature Prize. His tragic death in 1936, at the hands of Franco’s forces, elevated Lorca to the status of one of the most popular poets not only in the United States but throughout the world. Yet Lorca’s finest poems are filled with a mystery that is, as the poet himself said, “inexplicable.”
Lorca himself was somewhat weary of being revered and hailed as a “folk poet, Gypsy poet, and national poet.” Tired of being treated as a so-called “simple poet” or “simple man,” he once joked that he was neither a hack poet nor a nationalist worthy of being called a “national poet”: “……Actually, I’m the kind of person who prefers a good Chinese person to a bad Spaniard.”
The fact that I am translating Lorca’s poetry today is simply an expression of my love for the poet, which has lasted for nearly half a century.
Lorca’s Poetry Collections and Tragic Death
There is a significant gap between the dates of creation and publication of Lorca’s collections. ‘Book of Poems (Libro de poemas)’ was published in 1921, when he was 23, and ‘Songs (Canciones)’ was published in Málaga in 1927. Shortly thereafter, in 1928, he published ‘Romancero gitano’ (Gypsy Ballads), which earned him the National Literature Prize and brought him fame. In the meantime, he had written ‘Poema del Cante Jondo’ in 1921 and also left behind ‘Suites’, but these collections were published much later or posthumously.
His major works published during his lifetime include ‘Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias’ (1936), and ‘Poeta en Nueva York’ (1940), which was published posthumously in Mexico. These two works were written in 1934 and between 1929 and 1930, respectively; the latter was composed during his stay in the United States. His posthumous collection ‘Divan de Tamarit’ was also written between 1931 and 1935 but was published in 1940 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This was because his books could not be published in Spain under the Franco regime.
Born in 1898 and shot to death in 1936, Lorca’s 38-year life was marked by intense literary activity. In particular, from around 1930 onward, he wrote and directed numerous plays, achieving great success and reaching the peak of his popularity. Federico García Lorca’s popularity and friendships were among the direct factors that led to his tragic death.
In my book, ‘The Death and Mystery of the Poet Lorca’, I delve deeply into that “mystery” based on numerous contemporary documents and testimonies. According to that research, evidence suggests that Luis Alonso, a far-right Falange Party official, captured Lorca while he was hiding at the home of his friend, the poet Luis Rosales. As they took him away, they said: “……Because he is the one who, through his writing, has inflicted wounds on us far more terrifying than any gun!”
Lorca’s works and popularity, as well as his friendships with communists, provided more than enough reason for the far right to regard him as an enemy. Lorca was not a member of the Communist Party. Rather than holding any particular ideological bias, he was inclined toward a reverence for freedom—an inclination that, in some ways, bordered on anarchism. However, his works are permeated with a deep loathing for the conservative forces and the regime of the time. The killing of Gypsies is often depicted as the work of the Civil Guard (guardia civil). For example, in “Romance of a Nightmare,” those who come to kill his Gypsy lover appear as “a few drunken Civil Guards,” and even in works that seem to prophesy his own death, the Civil Guard comes to kill his friend.
Part of the poem goes like this: Now that you are about to die, remember the Virgin Mary. “Ah, Federico García, call the Civil Guard!”
The fact that Lorca was close friends with Rafael Alberti—a Communist Party leader and poet who was politically aligned with the Popular Front at the time—and even wrote a poem dedicated to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was enough for the far right to label him a leftist. Moreover, his stance in support of all the poor and vulnerable—including the Roma—provided the perfect grounds for branding him a communist or a Soviet spy.
In the summer of 1936, Lorca sensed that the shadow of death was looming over him. This was because mobs of far-right extremists, having succeeded in their uprising, were arbitrarily rounding up and executing people. Ultimately, feeling his life was in danger, he decided to take refuge at the home of his far-right friend Luis Rosales; however, that choice was short-lived, as he was arrested on the afternoon of August 16 and shot on the night of the 19th.
Lorca’s poetry echoes with many poems in which he foresaw his own death. For example, the lines that serve as his epitaph are as follows: When I die, bury me beneath the sand with my guitar. When I die, between the mint and the orange groves. When I die, if you feel like it, just bury me inside a weather vane. When I die!
The Eternal Death of a Child
Lorca’s death can be interpreted as the death of a child. Although he was only thirty-eight years old, what he loved most and grieved over most deeply was the death of innocence, nature, and beauty—that is, the death of a child. From his very first collection of poems, Lorca frequently explored a fairy-tale-like world and the small creatures of nature—such as lizards, turtles, and insects—and he wrote countless children’s poems. This demonstrates that he took the innocence and beauty of childhood as his poetic model. Consequently, his poems about death usually feature images of children.
Death and the Child
In a poem about death identical to “Epitaph,” he sings: Farewell. When I die, leave the balcony open. A child is eating an orange. (I can see it from my balcony.) A farmer is reaping wheat. (I can feel it from my balcony.) When I die, leave the balcony open!
In these two poems, death, oranges, and a child are the common threads. Who else but a child could be “the person dying inside a weather vane or a pinwheel”? That is why Lorca’s death is twice as sad. He is called a poet of dramatic tragedy precisely because he died as a child. To die an untimely death in solitude and melancholy—without ever having lived in the world, or having seen only pain even if one had lived—is doubly painful. Yet that pain is even more deeply sorrowful because, before it stems merely from such circumstances, it represents the existential limits toward which human life is headed—corruption, depravity, and death. The age of the orange—childhood—is when vitality and purity are at their peak. Lorca’s wish is to see, even in death, the sight of “a child eating an orange.”
In “Cascada 1: The Child Wounded by Water,” the “child’s death” appears like a baptism performed beneath the currents of mystery. Recall the sound of water at the Alhambra Palace. It is the sound of unspoiled beauty and tranquility, now swept away by the passage of time. Even the suffering and death of the child of old, worn away by the currents of time, sound infinitely beautiful. Thus, the poet sings:
(Excerpt) The child and the agony of death were two parallel streaks of blue rain, facing each other as one. The child lay on the ground. And the agony of the child’s death wound its way down in twists and turns. I want to descend into the well. I want to die, savoring my death one mouthful at a time. I want to fill my chest with moss, so that I may see the child wounded by water.
Even when the poet went to New York, he encountered “the girl who drowned in the well.” The dead girl he met in “Granada and Newburgh” is a tragic figure, trapped in water and the passage of time, forever unable to “flow out” again. It is an image reminiscent of the sound of water in the Alhambra Gardens of Granada—the former glory of the Cordoba Empire, forever trapped in the past and legend. It is something like “your childhood, now an old tale told by a spring,” yet at the same time, it is a razor-sharp limit and a diamond-hard future that cannot rise to become the present:
Yet no one can grant you distance in the darkness; what is given to you is only a razor-sharp limit, a diamond-hard future, … that does not flow away. At the end of the currents that accept the struggle between predestined solitude and roots, you are eternal, forever … unable to flow away.
Love and Death
What happens when a child falls in love? What happens when one loves another person, as in ‘The Long, Long Journey to Find Mom’? What happens when one loves solely for the sake of true love? What would happen if, without thinking of marriage or having children, one were to play and love forever, like Peter Pan? A love like “a diamond-hard future that never flows away…” ultimately leads to death in reality.
If that love, like Romeo and Juliet’s, cannot be fulfilled due to real-world obstacles, the ending is death. If love breathes and lives—like inhaling and exhaling—amidst meetings and longing, then love deprived of those meetings induces suffocation, much like breathing that consists only of longing and inhalation. It is a life spent in the temptation of death, endlessly yearning to die. Wagner’s love between Tristan and Isolde was also ultimately unfulfilled, and the suffocation born of longing created the tragedy. In medieval literature, there remains a tradition in which true love is often linked to the temptation of death. Especially in courtly romance, love was merely an explosion of emotion and did not provide a happy ending culminating in marriage. Therefore, medieval love was marked by anguish, struggle, conflict, and the temptation of death.
Lorca, too, experiences this pain of love in “It Is True”: Oh, how exhausting it is to love you with true love! Because of my love for you, the wind hurts, my heart aches, and even my hat aches.
If love causes pain not only in the heart but even in the hat, isn’t that truly agonizing? But if that love does not progress toward a real marriage, children, or a family—as in “The Blood Wedding”—then ultimately, the only path it can “flow” toward is separation or death. Yet, profound love desires nothing but love itself. Such love may be like a fiery wind that does not seek marriage or a family. Like the love of Leonardo, the bride’s lover, if love is fire, then family is water. One feels that profound love is extinguished upon contact with water.
We liken love to a rose. Yet a rose is not a union of fire and water. In “Cascida 7: The Rose,” Lorca says that the rose “was searching for something else”:
The rose was not seeking science or shadow: on the border between dream and flesh, the rose was seeking something else. The rose was not seeking a rose: motionless, somewhere in the sky, it was seeking something else.
So what is that “something else” the rose is seeking? It may well be love for love’s sake—the very pursuit of Tantrism or pure eroticism. If sexuality signifies both pleasure and procreation, then sexuality for pleasure alone—the act of love for love’s sake—is pure eroticism. Perhaps the “something else” that the rose seeks here is a mystical eroticism bordering on the religious.
We know that Lorca was gay. Of course, he did not completely forbid contact with the opposite sex, but Lorca’s prioritization of love and eroticism is clear. He even described this as “the ghost of longing in the land of Andalusia.” Andalusia is a land of sunshine, whitewashed walls, pots of red clover hanging from the walls, and widows dressed in black sitting in front of their homes. It is a semi-arid climate where Gypsies, bullfighting, and bullfighters thrive, and where the land cracks due to scarce rainfall. Neither the Gypsies nor the bullfighters nor the land of Andalusia have anything to do with complacency or procreation. Yet, the vitality and courage of bullfighting, as well as the love of the Gypsies, are beautiful in their own way. Alongside Lorca, the “han” of Andalusia resonates with the tragedy born of eroticism as the highest ideal. This also connects to the “han” of our people.
The Andalusian women who appear in Lorca’s poetry—including “Yerma”—are either women who, while watering the land to make it fertile and longing to bear children, go mad with thirst, or strangely sorrowful women who pay no heed even when seduced by a dashing man. What dwells within their hearts is the spirit of Andalusian han—they are women who embody, more than anyone else, the tragedy of love so profound it has no outlet, a love that leads to death.
Three bullfighters—slim-waisted bullfighters—passed by, dressed in orange and wearing old silver swords. “Let’s go to Seville together, my lady.” The lady pretends not to hear. As the afternoon turned purple and the sunlight faded, a young man passed by, adorned with moon-gilded grass and roses: “Let’s go to Granada together, my lady.” But the lady pretends not to hear. The young lady with the pretty face kept picking olives, embracing the ashen wind that wrapped around her waist. Tree, oh tree, you blue-dried tree.
