Federico Garcia Lorca
(1898–1936)
The House of Bernarda Alba, translation by Robert David MacDonald
Theatr Clwyd, 1996
“I’m often surprised when people think that the things in my work are daring improvisations of my own, a poet’s audacities. Not at all. They’re authentic details… I have a huge storehouse of childhood recollections in which I can hear the people speaking. This is poetic memory, and I trust it implicitly.”
Federico García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, a village in the fertile agricultural area known as the vega that surrounds the Andalusian city of Granada. Andalusia, with its harsh terrain and mountains, its Moorish past and indigenous gypsy communities, became the inspiration and setting for the vast majority of Lorca’s work as both poet and playwright, while his language and imagery derived largely from the collective awareness the people of the region have for nature and its physical participation in the affairs of men. On his father’s side, the family – one of rich landowners – was artistically gifted and the young Lorca inherited much of this natural talent. At first he studied to become a pianist, but with the publication of his first poems at the age of twenty and the book Impresiones y paisajes (Impressions and Landscapes), describing in poetic prose his reactions to the decaying spirit of Old Spain, he decided to dedicate himself to writing. The following year he went to study in Madrid and for the next ten years lived at the famous Residencia de Estudiantes, a kind of Spanish Oxbridge college, where he became close to Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí and the emergent Spanish Surrealist school. Here he had soon produced his first verse play, El maleficio de la mariposa (The Butterfly’s Curse) as well as a book of poems, Libro de poemas.
Lorca’s interest in Surrealism found an echo in the extraordinary ancient gypsy songs of Cante Jondo, the precursor of Flamenco. Returning to Granada (where he studied for a law degree), he began work on a Cante Jondo festival with the composer Manuel de Falla, and a book of verse, Poema del Cante Jondo.
For the next five years, Lorca struggled to pursue his career as a writer against the scepticism of his family, upon whom he was financially dependent. However, 1927 saw the publication of Canciones (Songs), which received widespread acclaim, and the historical drama Mariana Pineda. Designed by Dalí, this play was a direct response to the growing political turmoil around him, and the overthrow of democracy by the dictator José Antonio Primo de Rivera. An exhibition of Lorca’s drawings and paintings was similarly well received in Barcelona, as was Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads), published in 1928.
At the end of the decade Lorca left Spain and travelled to Cuba and New York, where he enrolled at Columbia University. His horror of this dehumanised city, the terror and loneliness of a man cut off from nature and entombed in a huge oppressive machine, resulted in the great cycle of poems Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York), which was published posthumously in 1940. Lorca detested oppression, and was particularly moved by the plight of the black community in Harlem. Not only was he struck by the similarity between black music and Cante Jondo, but he saw both communities condemned as second-class citizens in a harsh and exploitative world.
On his return to Spain, Lorca produced a number of light comedies, among which La zapatera prodigiosa (The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife) was a great success in Madrid. He was then invited by the newly elected progressive Republican government to form a theatre company. The Teatro Universitario, more familiarly known as La Barraca, toured the country with productions of plays by Spain’s greatest writers. Eager to play his part in the cultural regeneration of his homeland, Lorca threw himself into the work. He believed “theatre is the barometer of a country’s greatness”. Following the company’s first successful tour, he started work on Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding), about a bride’s elopement on her wedding night and the subsequent revenge of her groom. The plot was based on a newspaper article Lorca had read some five years previously, and such a long gestation period was typical of his working method. An incident would appeal to his imagination, but then it would be consigned to his subconscious until the complete play was ready to be written out. Once started, Bodas de sangre took little more than a week to compose. Its premiere, on 8 March 1933, was an enormous success. Yerma (1934), Doña Rosita (1935) and La casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba, completed in 1936 but first produced posthumously in 1945), followed, securing Lorca’s reputation as Spain’s greatest 20th-century literary talent. At this time his fame was also spreading abroad. He undertook a lecture tour of Argentina and directed both his own plays and the classics in Buenos Aires.
However, Lorca’s progressive beliefs, and his questioning of the traditional values of the church, were rapidly securing him powerful enemies. Although he declared that as a poet he was a revolutionary by inclination but not political, and despite his friendships among the right-wing Falangists – their leader Primo de Rivera was an admirer of his work – Lorca’s support of the popular front was to have tragic consequences. In the wake of growing political upheaval and violence, on 11 July the right wing seized Radio Valencia and announced the imminence of a Fascist revolution. The country was plunged into one of this century’s most bloody civil wars. Franco, the Fascist leader, announced that if he had to kill half the population of Spain to gain control, he would do so. On the outbreak of war Lorca was in Madrid, but against the advice of his friends he returned to Granada which almost immediately fell to the Fascists. The slaughter began of thousands of Republican sympathisers. Aware of the enormous danger he was in, Lorca went into hiding at the home of his friend the young poet Luis Rosales, but on 16 August 1936 a group of Fascists arrested him.
From his earliest childhood, Lorca had been obsessed with the idea of his own violent death, and his premonition was to be proved correct. After three days he was taken to a deserted spot beyond the city where he was shot and buried in an unmarked mass grave. He was 38 years old. His death certificate, not drawn up until 1940, stated that he died from war wounds.
