Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca
Federico García Lorca at the Huerta de San Vicente, 1932
Died	August 18, 1936
Cause of death	Shot by firing squad, victim of the repression in the rebel zone during the Spanish Civil War
Resting place	Unidentified mass grave somewhere along the road from Víznar to Alfacar
Occupations	Writer, poet and playwright. From 1931 to 1936, co-director of La Barraca, a traveling university theater group.

Federico García Lorca (Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, June 5, 1898 – road from Víznar to Alfacar, Granada, August 18, 1936) was a Spanish poet, playwright and prose writer.

Associated with the Generation of '27, he was the most influential and popular poet of 20th-century Spanish literature, and as a playwright he is considered one of the summits of 20th-century Spanish theater.

Although he always declared himself apolitical, and had friends of all political tendencies (among them figures such as the leader and founder of the Falange Española, José Antonio Primo de Rivera), García Lorca ended up being shot by members of the rebel side one month after the coup d'état of July 1936 that triggered the start of the Spanish Civil War, on accusations of being a «socialist», a friend of Fernando de los Ríos, a «Russian spy», a «Freemason, belonging to the 'Alhambra' lodge», and for «practices of homosexualism and aberration».

Biography

He was born on June 5, 1898, in the Granadan municipality of Fuente Vaqueros, into a family of comfortable economic standing, and was baptized as Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca. His father was the landowner Federico García Rodríguez (1859–1945) and his mother was Vicenta Lorca Romero (1870–1959), his father's second wife, a schoolteacher who encouraged her son's literary taste. His first home, in Fuente Vaqueros, is today a museum.

Federico García Lorca at six years of age.

In 1906 he went to live with his tutor Antonio Rodríguez Espinosa in Almería, living there during the 1907–1908 school year and the months of July and August of that same year. But he fell ill with a mouth disease, which led him to move to Granada and to study from 1909 at the Sagrado Corazón de Jesús.

In his adolescence, he was more interested in music than in literature; he studied piano with Antonio Segura Mesa, and among his university friends he was known more as a musician than as a novice writer. In 1926, at the ancestral home of the García-Trevijano family in Órgiva, he premiered at the piano a mazurka composed by Manuel de Falla for Carmen García-Trevijano, at the time the aunt of the anti-Franco lawyer and politician Antonio García-Trevijano.

Youth and first works

In 1914 he enrolled at the University of Granada to study Philosophy and Letters and Law. During this period, the young Lorca met with other young intellectuals at the El Rinconcillo gathering at the Café Alameda.

At the University he was taught by Martín Domínguez Berrueta, who took Lorca and his classmates on trips through Baeza, Úbeda, Córdoba, Ronda, León, Burgos and Galicia. These trips through different parts of Spain were what awakened his vocation as a writer. Indeed, the fruit of this was his first prose book, Impresiones y paisajes, published in 1918, a small anthology of his best prose pages on political topics and on his aesthetic interests.

Life at the Residencia de Estudiantes

In the spring of 1919, several of his friends from the El Rinconcillo gathering moved to Madrid, and Lorca, thanks to the help of Fernando de los Ríos, who helped him convince his parents to let him continue his studies at the Residencia de Estudiantes, soon joined them. Thus the poet became part of this institution.

The Residencia de Estudiantes was at that time a hotbed of intellectual activity, which hosted figures of the stature of Albert Einstein, John Maynard Keynes and Marie Curie, which had an enormous influence on Lorca's intellectual formation. In this way, between 1919 and 1926, he associated with many of the most important writers and intellectuals in Spain, such as Luis Buñuel, Rafael Alberti and Salvador Dalí, and managed to escape the provincial cultural tedium he hated, as he wrote to his friend the composer Adolfo Salazar:

I am ablaze like a hundred-petaled rose, but reality shuts me up in its ugly house of esparto. They write to me from the Residencia telling me they have no room. This is terrible! How am I going to go anywhere else? The Baroja and Galdós atmospheres frighten me, the landlady, the dissolute student... How horrible! And let us not even speak of the Zamacois atmospheres, etc... It is horrible! So, until I have a room to myself at the Residencia I am not going to Madrid... What a pity! [...] I have bad luck. And I need to get out, do you hear? I am suffocating. This terrible and empty provincial atmosphere fills my heart with cobwebs.

— 

Between 1919 and 1921, Lorca published Libro de poemas, composed his first Suites, premiered El maleficio de la mariposa and developed other theatrical pieces. Also during this period, thanks once again to the help of Fernando de los Ríos, he had the opportunity to meet Juan Ramón Jiménez, who influenced his vision of poetry and with whom he became close friends.

In May 1921, Lorca returned to Granada, thus having the opportunity to meet the maestro Manuel de Falla, who had settled in the city in September of the previous year. Their friendship led them to undertake several projects around music, cante jondo, puppets, and other parallel artistic activities. That same year, Lorca wrote the Poema del cante jondo, a work that was published in 1931. Those years in Granada revolved around two cultural centers: Falla and the El Rinconcillo gathering, held at the Café Alameda.

Excursion in Granada by Federico García Lorca and friends (1926)

On January 6, 1923, the feast of the Three Kings, Falla took part in a private party organized by Federico, Adolfo Salazar and Hermenegildo Lanz, dedicated to two girls of the family, his sister Isabel and Laura, the daughter of Fernando de los Ríos. They staged a Lorcan adaptation for cachiporra puppets of the tale La niña que riega la albahaca y el príncipe preguntón, an interlude attributed to Cervantes, and the Misterio de los Reyes Magos, a 13th-century auto sacramental, for which Falla had collaborated in composing the incidental music. That same year, Lorca and Falla worked on a lyric operetta, Lola, la comedianta, a work they never finished.

Postcard from Federico and Dalí to Antonio de Luna García: «Dear Antoñito: In the midst of a delightful atmosphere of sea, phonographs and cubist paintings I greet you and embrace you. Dalí and I are preparing una cosa que estarà moll bé. Una cosa moll bonic. Without realizing it I have slipped into Catalan. Goodbye Antonio, give my regards to your father and to yourself with my best unalterable friendship. Have you seen what they have done to Paquito!, (silence).»

Santo peregrino. Ink and colored pencil drawing on paper. Personal gift to Antonio de Luna García (Granada, 1926)

In 1925 he traveled to Cadaqués to spend Holy Week at the home of his friend Salvador Dalí. This visit and another, longer one in 1927 left a deep mark on the life and work of both. The fruit of this intense friendship was the "Oda a Salvador Dalí", which was published in the Revista de Occidente in 1926. In addition, it was Dalí himself who encouraged the writer to take up painting, getting him to present his first exhibition at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona in 1927. For his part, Lorca encouraged Dalí as a writer, and called him his "erotic love". In 1925 he met Emilio Aladrén, with whom he would have a romantic relationship until 1927, when Emilio left him for Eleanor Doven, whom he later married.

Generation of '27

Main article: Generation of '27

The term derives from the date of December 1927, when several Spanish poets gathered in Seville, at an event organized by the Economic Society of Friends of the Country to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of the death of Luis de Góngora. It should be noted that this gathering is the origin of what some call the Generation of '27, which includes writers such as Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti, Dámaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego, Luis Cernuda, Vicente Aleixandre, Manuel Altolaguirre and Emilio Prados.

Not all scholars accept the concept of a generation for the Generation of '27, since it does not meet the criteria established by the historian Julius Petersen (close birth dates; similar educational background; good relations among them; close dates of publication of their first works; a generational historical event; shared ideas; a generational language; the presence of an ideological guide; and the stagnation of the previous generation). Some have proposed a change of name, such as «Generation of the Dictatorship», «Guillén-Lorca Generation», «Generation of 1925», «Generation of the Avant-gardes» or «Generation of Friendship». Nevertheless, it is a widely accepted term out of convenience and custom.

This group is characterized by fusing the forms of traditional poetry (neopopularism) with avant-garde movements; by treating the same themes in a similar way (death in a tragic sense; love as a force that gives meaning to life; social concerns such as injustice, poverty, etc.), by the use of metaphor and image; etc.

Returning to Lorca's life, it can be said that the period from 1924 to 1927 was the moment when the writer reached his maturity as a poet.

However, it is also during this period that Federico García Lorca lived, in his own words, «one of the deepest crises of my life», even though his works Canciones and Primer romancero gitano, published in 1927 and 1928 respectively, were enjoying great critical and popular success. This crisis was caused by several events in his life. On the one hand, with the success of the Romancero gitano, Lorca began to be seen as a costumbrista writer, a defender of the Gypsies, tied to Spanish folklore. He complained about this in a letter to Jorge Guillén, saying: «My Gypsy myth is starting to bother me a little. The Gypsies are a theme. And nothing more. I could just as well be a poet of sewing needles or of hydraulic landscapes. Besides, Gypsyism gives me a tone of lack of culture, of lack of education and of a savage poet that you know well I am not. I do not want to be pigeonholed. I feel it is putting chains on me». And, on the other hand, he separated from Emilio Aladrén, a sculptor with whom he had had an intense emotional relationship. In addition, this crisis must have worsened when Lorca received harsh criticism from Dalí and Luis Buñuel about the Romancero gitano. Despite this, Lorca kept working and starting new projects, such as the magazine Gallo, of which only two issues were published, or the play Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, which he tried to premiere in 1929 but which was banned by the censorship of the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.

Trip to New York

In the spring of 1929, Fernando de los Ríos proposed that Lorca accompany him on his trip to New York. He accepted, seeing the opportunity to get away from Aladrén, learn English, change his life and renew his work. They embarked on the Olympic—sister ship of the ill-fated Titanic—at the beginning of June 1929 and arrived in New York on June 26; he himself described his stay in that American city as "one of the most useful experiences of my life". He described the city as a place «of wire and death» and was struck by the capitalist economy and the treatment of Black people. According to him, the United States was «a civilization without roots. [The English] have built houses and houses, but they have not dug deep into the earth». He poured his impressions into Poeta en Nueva York, which was not published until four years after his death. In his work Lorca sought to express «the painful slavery of man and machine together» in a city he called «geometry and anguish».

In March 1930 he left New York to travel to Havana, where he explored Cuban culture and Cuban music and worked on new projects such as El público and Así que pasen cinco años. By June 1930, Lorca was already in Madrid.

The traveling La Barraca

Main article: La Barraca (theater group)

Facsimile of the original poster with the La Barraca logo.

With the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic in April 1931, a new stage began for Lorca. Together with Eduardo Ugarte, the Granadan writer co-directed La Barraca, a university theater group that performed plays of the Golden Age (Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Miguel de Cervantes) in cities and towns across Spain. Financed by the Ministry of Education headed by the socialist Fernando de los Ríos, it was the first time he had a project of his own in his hands. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War would frustrate the endeavor.

In the spring of 1936 La Barraca gave its last performance at the Ateneo de Madrid, at the express request of Juana Capdevielle, librarian of the institution, to the traveling theater group, which performed El caballero de Olmedo by Lope de Vega.

In America

In 1933 the company of Lola Membrives premiered Bodas de sangre in Buenos Aires to great popular success. As a result, Lorca received an invitation from Membrives and her husband to travel to that Argentine city. There, he achieved professional triumph and, thanks to this, gained his economic independence. Over the six months he remained in Buenos Aires, he had the opportunity to direct Bodas de sangre, which was performed more than one hundred and fifty times; Mariana Pineda, La zapatera prodigiosa, El retablillo de don Cristóbal and an adaptation of La dama boba by Lope de Vega. Also during this time he had the occasion to give several lectures and to make new friends, such as Pablo Neruda, Juana de Ibarbourou, Ricardo Molinari, Salvador Novo and Pablo Suero.

When García Lorca returned to Spain in 1934, he maintained a high creative pace: he finished works such as Yerma, Doña Rosita la soltera, La casa de Bernarda Alba and Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías; he revised works such as Poeta en Nueva York, Diván del Tamarit y Suites; he made a trip to Barcelona to direct some of his works, recite his poems and give lectures, visited Valencia and continued staging plays with La Barraca; he organized theater clubs; etc. He also had a long stay in Montevideo (Uruguay), where he finished writing a couple of works (possibly Yerma) and had contact with local artists, such as Juana de Ibarbourou.

However, it was also at this time that Spain began to live through a period of violence and intolerance. The political situation was untenable. The Spanish Civil War was about to break out. The most reactionary sectors were pursuing with force the campaign of discredit and hatred toward the democratic republican regime and its supporters. Lorca, because of his friendship with progressive figures such as Fernando de los Ríos or Alberti, was already singled out by part of the more conservative press, and from 1935 he was considered an enemy of the right. In January of that same year the anti-republican satirical magazine Gracia y Justicia insulted the poet on its cover, and inside it branded his dramas as blasphemous (the magazine belonged to the Editorial Católica), alluded to his homosexuality in a contemptuous way and insinuated in a threatening tone: «He should not play ring-around-the-rosy with certain things!».

Last days and execution

Lorca on a café terrace on the Paseo de Recoletos in the summer of 1936

Colombia and Mexico, whose ambassadors foresaw that the poet might be the victim of an attack because of his post as an official of the Republic, offered him exile, but Lorca rejected the offers, and went to the Huerta de San Vicente to join his family. He arrived there on July 14, 1936, three days before the military uprising against the Republic that gave rise to the Civil War broke out in Melilla. Initially, the situation in the Granadan capital was calm and there were no incidents. However, on the 20th, the city's military garrison rose up and in a short time the center of Granada was in the hands of the rebel forces. Federico's brother-in-law and Mayor of the city, Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, was arrested in his office at the city hall. He would be shot a month later.

Huerta de San Vicente (today a museum), García Lorca's summer house in Granada, where he went a few days before the outbreak of the civil war.

Someone asked him about his political preference, although the date is unknown, and he stated that he felt himself to be at once Catholic, communist, anarchist, libertarian, traditionalist and monarchist. However, he always showed himself to be «on the side of those who have nothing», as he declared in 1934. As the historian Paul Preston has pointed out, Lorca, «driven by a deep social conscience, created his traveling theater company, La Barraca, regularly signed anti-fascist manifestos and collaborated with organizations such as International Red Aid. For this he earned the contempt of the Falange and the rest of the right. In his own city he maintained a close relationship with the moderate left-wing groups». His family was very close friends with the socialist Fernando de los Ríos.

Lorca never joined any group and never discriminated against or distanced himself from any of his friends over any political issue. He knew the leader and founder of the Falange Española, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was very fond of poetry. Lorca himself said of him to the young Gabriel Celaya, in March 1936:

José Manuel [Aizpurúa] is like José Antonio. Another good boy. Did you know that I have dinner with him every Friday? We usually go out together in a taxi with the blinds down, because it does not suit him to be seen with me, nor does it suit me to be seen with him.

This statement is understood by scholars as an exaggeration or a joke, as Celaya himself pointed out when relating this anecdote. In describing the scene, he sums up the dramatic consequences of García Lorca's reckless attitude:

Federico was laughing. He thought that this was nothing more than a children's prank. He saw nothing behind it. He laughed as if at a good joke. But that laughter, that trust that man is always human, that belief that a friend, fascist or not, is a friend, cost him his life. Because it was some friends, friends whom he counted among his best, who at the last moment turned out to be first and foremost fascists.

He felt himself, as he told the journalist and caricaturist Luis Bagaría in an interview for El Sol of Madrid shortly before his death, wholly Spanish, but «before that a man of the world and brother of all».

I am wholly Spanish and it would be impossible for me to live outside my geographical limits; but I hate the person who is Spanish just for being Spanish, I am brother to all and I execrate the man who sacrifices himself for a nationalist, abstract idea, for the sole reason that he loves his homeland with a blindfold over his eyes. The good Chinese man is closer to me than the bad Spaniard. I sing of Spain and I feel it to the marrow, but before that I am a man of the world and brother of all. Of course I do not believe in the political border.

The olive tree where he may have been shot

In Granada he sought refuge at the home of the family of his friend the poet Luis Rosales, where he felt safer since two of his brothers, whom he trusted, were prominent Falangists in Granada. Despite this, on August 16, 1936, the Civil Guard appeared there to arrest him. The guards were accompanied by Juan Luis Trescastro Medina, Luis García-Alix Fernández and Ramón Ruiz Alonso, a former deputy of the CEDA, who had denounced Lorca to the civil governor of Granada, José Valdés Guzmán. Valdés consulted Queipo de Llano on what he should do, to which the latter replied: «Give him coffee, lots of coffee». According to the historian Ian Gibson, the poet was accused of «being a spy for the Russians, being in contact with them by radio, having been the secretary of Fernando de los Ríos and being homosexual». He was taken to the Civil Government building, and then to the village of Víznar, where he spent his last night in a makeshift jail, together with other detainees.

After the exact date of his death had been the subject of a long controversy, it now seems definitively established that Federico García Lorca was shot at 4:45 a.m. on August 18, on the road that runs from Víznar to Alfacar. His body, which was never recovered, remains buried in an anonymous mass grave somewhere in that area, together with the corpse of a national schoolteacher, Dióscoro Galindo, and those of the anarchist banderilleros Francisco Galadí and Joaquín Arcollas, executed with him. Juan Luis Trescastro would later boast of having personally taken part in the killings, emphasizing Lorca's homosexuality.

On April 23, 2015, a police report dated July 9, 1965, was made public, based on an investigation carried out that same year, which corroborated Lorca's execution by the Francoist authorities. The report accused him of being a «socialist», a friend of Fernando de los Ríos, and a «Freemason, belonging to the 'Alhambra' lodge, in which he adopted the symbolic name of 'Homer'», and attributed to him «practices of homosexualism and aberration». It also states that he was sentenced to death after «having confessed», although it does not specify what he would have confessed. The report was drafted by the 3rd Regional Brigade of Social Investigation of the Higher Police Headquarters of Granada at the request of the French Hispanist Marcelle Auclair, although she never received a reply, since the report was concealed by the Francoist dictatorship. The existence of this report was first mentioned by the Falangist journalist Eduardo Molina Fajardo in his posthumous book, Los últimos días de García Lorca (1983). According to Gibson, it is evident that Molina Fajardo had had access to the police report.

Although for more than forty years the figure of Federico García Lorca has been used for political purposes, recent research by Miguel Caballero and Pilar Góngora reveals that Lorca's death was not due exclusively to ideological motives, but was also deeply tied to family and personal rivalries among the García Rodríguez, Roldán and Alba families, rooted in the Vega de Granada since the late 19th century.

The conflict between these families intensified because of economic and political disputes, such as competition in the sugar beet business, and political ones, or the annulment of elections in 1918 in which Lorca's father played a key role. The situation worsened with the publication of La casa de Bernarda Alba in 1936, in which Lorca used real names of the Alba family, ridiculing them and provoking the anger of this family, which was close to the Roldáns. Despite the pleas of his mother and brother to change the names, Lorca refused, further fueling the tensions. These quarrels culminated in the denunciation by Ramón Ruiz Alonso, linked to the Roldáns and to Juan Luis Trescastro, showing that family quarrels also carried significant weight in his tragic end.

After his murder

Monument to García Lorca in the Plaza de Santa Ana in Madrid.

After his death, Primeras canciones and Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín were published.

One of the most harrowing works about the fact of his death is the poem «El crimen fue en Granada», written by Antonio Machado in 1937. On the other side, Unidad, a Falangist newspaper from San Sebastián, published on March 11, 1937, a heartfelt elegy signed by Luis Hurtado Álvarez and titled «A la España imperial le han asesinado su mejor poeta».

One of the most documented, controversial and popular biographies of Federico García Lorca is the best-seller published in 1989 and titled Federico García Lorca: A life (Vida, pasión y muerte de Federico García Lorca, Spanish edition in 1998), by the Irish-born Hispanist Ian Gibson. Commemorating the centenary of his birth, on June 5, 1998, the television broadcasts of Canal Sur 2 began.

In 2009, in application of the law for the recovery of historical memory approved by the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the grave where the poet's remains supposedly rested was opened, and nothing was found.

In May 2012 his last letter came to light, addressed to his close friend, the writer and art critic Juan Ramírez de Lucas. In 2014 work began to locate the grave where he was buried and to identify bodies, although given the refusal of the poet's family, the exhumation of his body seems unlikely. In 2015 the writer Marta Osorio published a book analyzing the information that Agustín Penón gathered about the location of the poet's body (mainly from Emilia Llanos, a close friend of the poet), pointing to a transfer of the body to another location on the same road where he was buried, or even to Madrid.

Work

Manuscript of Poema doble del lago Eden (Poeta en Nueva York)

The Lorcan universe is defined by a palpable systematism: poetry, drama and prose feed on obsessions—love, desire, sterility—and on constant stylistic keys. The variety of forms and tones never undermines that unity, whose central issue is frustration.

Style

Symbols: in keeping with his taste for traditional elements, Lorca frequently uses symbols in his poetry. They very often refer to death although, depending on the context, the nuances vary considerably. The central symbols in Lorca are:

• The moon: it is the most frequent symbol in Lorca. Its most frequent meaning is death, but it can also symbolize eroticism, fertility, sterility or beauty.
• Water: when it flows, it is a symbol of vitality. When it is stagnant, it represents death.
• Blood: it represents life and, when spilled, death. It also symbolizes fertility and sexuality.
• The horse (and its rider): it is very present throughout his work, always carrying connotations of death, although it also represents life and male eroticism.
• The bull: García Lorca was a bullfighting enthusiast; in his words: «I believe that bullfighting is the most cultured festival there is in the world. It is the pure drama in which the Spaniard sheds his best tears and his bile. It is the only place one goes with the certainty of seeing death surrounded by the most dazzling beauty (...)».
• Grasses and herbs: their dominant, though not only, value is that of being symbols of death.
• Metals: their dominant value is also death. Metals appear in the form of bladed weapons, which always bring tragedy.

Metaphor: it is the central rhetorical device of his style. Under the influence of Góngora, Lorca handles very daring metaphors: the distance between the real term and the imaginary one is considerable. At times, he directly uses pure metaphor. However, unlike Góngora, Lorca is a conceptista poet, in the sense that his poetry is characterized by great condensation of expression and content, as well as frequent ellipsis. Lorcan metaphors relate opposing elements of reality, convey intermingled sensory effects, etc.

Neopopularism: although Lorca assimilates literary novelties without difficulty, his work is full of traditional elements that, moreover, demonstrate his immense literary culture. Traditional music and songs are constant presences in his poetry. Nevertheless, from a formal point of view he is not a poet who displays a great variety of traditional forms; however, he delves into the constants of the traditional spirit of his land and its people: heartbreak in love, courage, melancholy and passion.

Poetry

Self-portrait by Federico García Lorca for Poeta en Nueva York

Lorca's poetic work constitutes one of the summits of the poetry of the Generation of '27 and of all Spanish literature. Lorcan poetry is the reflection of a tragic sense of life, and is linked to different authors, traditions and literary currents. In this poetry, popular and learned tradition coexist. Although it is difficult to establish periods in Lorca's poetics, some critics distinguish two stages: one of youth and another of fullness.

Period of youth

This includes his first writings: Impresiones y paisajes (in prose, though it nonetheless shows procedures characteristic of poetic language) and Libro de poemas (written under the influence of Rubén Darío, Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez); in this poem García Lorca projects a hopeless love, doomed to sadness.

In 1986 the Provincial Council of Granada published a poetic anthology, selected, introduced and annotated by Andrew A. Anderson. This anthology contributes Suites (1920–1923) and Poemas en prosa (1927–1928). In Suites is found «Cancioncilla del niño que no nació» (p. 71), and in Poemas en prosa «Degollación de los Inocentes» (p. 150). In these writings the poet refers to the drama of abortion.

La viudita y el conde Cabra, based on a true story that reached his ears through a children's song.

Period of fullness

It begins with the Poema del cante jondo (1921) which, through its thematic, formal and conceptual unity and the expression of feelings, owed in part to its folkloric inspiration, describes the neopopularist lyric of the Generation of '27.

García Maroto and García Lorca. Painting by Rafael Barradas (1926).

In Primeras canciones (1926) and Canciones (1927) he uses the same forms: the song and the romance. The themes of time and death are framed in the dawn, the night, the city of Granada and lunar landscapes.

Death and the moral incompatibility of the Gypsy world with bourgeois society are the two great themes of the Romancero gitano. The usual procedures of poetry of popular origin stand out, as does the influence of the composer Manuel de Falla. It is not a folkloric work; it is based on the commonplaces with which the Gypsy and the Granadan are associated. Lorca raises the Gypsy figure to the rank of literary myth, as he would later also do with the Black man and the Jew in Poeta en Nueva York. In the Romancero gitano he uses the romance, in its novelistic, lyrical and dramatic variants; his language is a fusion of the popular and the learned.

Lorca wrote Poeta en Nueva York based on his experience in the United States, where he lived between 1929 and 1930. For Lorca, modern civilization and nature are incompatible. His vision of New York is one of nightmare and desolation, like that of a bad dream. To express the anguish and the longing for communication that overwhelm him, he uses the visionary images of surrealist language. His expressive freedom is at its peak, although alongside free verse one notices the use of measured verse (octosyllables, hendecasyllables and alexandrines).

The Diván del Tamarit (1940) is a book of poems with an oriental atmosphere or flavor, inspired by the collections of ancient Arabic-Andalusi poetry. The central theme is love subject to frustrating and bitter experiences; its language is very close to that of Poeta en Nueva York.

Llanto por la muerte de Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935) is an elegy of uncontainable grief and emotion that serves as a tribute to the Sevillian bullfighter who did so much to support the poets of the Generation of '27.

García Lorca's poetic work closes with Seis poemas gallegos and the series of eleven love poems titled Sonetos del amor oscuro. Lorca has always enjoyed the unconditional respect and admiration of poets of the generations after the Civil War. Considered a poète maudit, his influence has been felt among the Spanish poets of malditismo.

Poetry books

De Profundis in Leiden

• Canciones (1921)
• Poema del cante jondo (1921)
• Oda a Salvador Dalí (1926)
• Romancero gitano (1928)
• Poeta en Nueva York (1930)
• Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935)
• Seis poemas galegos (1935)
• Sonetos del amor oscuro (1936)
• Diván del Tamarit (1940)

Theater

García Lorca's theater is, together with that of Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, the most important written in Spanish in the 20th century. It is a poetic theater, in the sense that it revolves around core symbols—blood, the knife or the rose—, that it unfolds in mythical spaces or presents a transcended realism, and that, in short, it confronts fundamental problems of existence. Its language, learned from Valle-Inclán, is also poetic. Lorca was also influenced by modernista drama (from which derives the use of verse), Lopean theater (evident, for example, in the organized use of popular song), Calderonian theater (tragic excess, a sense of allegory) and the tradition of puppets. Lorca's dramatic production can be grouped into four sets: farces, «unstageable» comedies (according to the author), tragedies and dramas.

Among the farces, written between 1921 and 1928, stand out La zapatera prodigiosa, in which the Granadan setting serves as support for the Cervantine conflict between imagination and reality, and Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, a complex ritual of initiation into love, which anticipates the «unstageable dramas» of 1930 and 1931: El público and Así que pasen cinco años, his two most hermetic works, are an inquiry into the fact of theater, revolution and presumed homosexuality—the first—and an exploration—the second—of the human being and the meaning of living.

Aware of the success of poetic rural dramas, Lorca wrote the tragedies Bodas de sangre (1933) and Yerma (1934), a combination of myth, poetry and real substance. Human problems determine the dramas. Thus, the theme of the Spanish «spinster» (Doña Rosita la soltera, 1935), or that of the repression of women and intolerance in La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936), for many the author's masterpiece.

Plays

• El maleficio de la mariposa (1920)
• Mariana Pineda (1927)
• La zapatera prodigiosa (1930)
• Retablillo de Don Cristóbal (1930)
• El público (1930)
• Así que pasen cinco años (1931)
• Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín (1933)
• Bodas de sangre (1933)
• Yerma (1934)
• Doña Rosita la soltera o el lenguaje de las flores (1935)
• La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936)
• Comedia sin título (unfinished) (1936)

Prose

• Impresiones y paisajes (1918)

Filmography

Portrait of Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca (1927)

About Lorca's life

• Deep song, black sound (1968), by P. Luke for the BBC.
• L'assassinio di Federico Garcia Lorca (1976), by Alessandro Cane for RAI.

• Federico García Lorca: Murder in Granada (1976), television documentary directed by Humberto López y Guerra, produced by Swedish television TV1.
• Lorca, muerte de un poeta (1987), Spanish television series directed by Juan Antonio Bardem.
• Muerte en Granada (1997), directed by Marcos Zurinaga.
• Lorca (1998), directed by Iñaki Elizalde.
• La luz prodigiosa (2003), directed by Miguel Hermoso.
• Lorca. El mar deja de moverse (2006), documentary directed by Emilio Ruiz Barrachina.
• Sin límites (Little ashes) (2008), directed by Paul Morrison, semi-biographical, about the relationships among Dalí, Lorca and Buñuel.
• El deseo y la realidad (2009), documentary directed by Rafael Zarza and Fernando García de Canales.
• Mudanza (2009), directed by Pere Portabella.

Actors who have portrayed him

• 1987 – Nickolas Grace in the series Lorca, muerte de un poeta.
• 1991 – Nikolas Stefanov in the TV movie Dali.
• 1996 – Andy García in the film Muerte en Granada.
• 1998 – Miguel Bosé in the short film Lorca.
• 2001 – Adrià Collado, in the film Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón.
• 2001 – Sergio Villanueva, in the miniseries Viento del pueblo.
• 2002 – Carles Marti in the TV movie Dalí, être Dieu.
• 2003 – Nino Manfredi in the film La luz prodigiosa.
• 2006 – Jaume Najarro in the short film El Perro catalán.
• 2008 – Jaime Villanueva in the miniseries Martes de carnaval.
• 2008 – Javier Beltrán, in the film Sin límites.
• 2011 – Cristian Olave, in the short film Cartas de Lorca.
• 2011 – Jordi Llovet, in the short film Puño poético.
• 2012 – Pepe Cibrián Campoy, in his play Marica.
• 2013 – Álvaro Ovalle in the film Federico García Lorca Noir Despair.
• 2015 – Ángel Ruiz in El ministerio del tiempo.
• 2015 – Fran Perea in the TV movie La Xirgu.
• 2016 – Nacho Brande in the stage musical Mi princesa roja.
• 2017 – Néstor Gutiérrez in the stage production Federico y Lola, el desencuentro.

Adaptations of his work

• Bodas de sangre (1938), by Edmundo Guibourg.
• Bodas de sangre (1981), by Carlos Saura.
• Nanas de espinas (1982), show by Salvador Távora inspired by Bodas de sangre.
• Proceso a Mariana Pineda (1984), by Rafael Moreno Alba, series for Televisión Española.
• La casa de Bernarda Alba (1987), by Mario Camus.
• Viaje a la Luna (1998), short film by Frederic Amat.
• Yerma (1998), by Pilar Távora.
• Yerma mater (2005), show by Salvador Távora inspired by Yerma.
• La novia (2015), film directed by Paula Ortiz.

Operas

• In another five years or so (1944), zarzuela by Paul Bowles based on Así que pasen cinco años.
• La zapatera prodigiosa (1949), by the Argentine composer Juan José Castro (1895–1968), premiered in Montevideo; (1982) by Udo Zimmermann
• Bodas de sangre by Juan José Castro (1952), Wolfgang Fortner (1957), Sándor Szokolay (1964), Nicola LeFanu (1992)
• Yerma, opera by Paul Bowles (1955), by Heitor Villa-Lobos (1955–1956, premiered in 1971).
• La casa de Bernarda Alba, by the Catalan Miquel Ortega, by Aribert Reimann (1998/2000)
• Ainadamar (2003), by Osvaldo Golijov, premiered at the Tanglewood Festival.
• Don Perlimplín ama a Belisa en su jardín, by Wolfgang Fortner 1962, by Bruno Maderna (1962), by Simon Holt (1998).
• Quimera, by Hans-Jürgen von Bose (1986).
• Comedia sin título, by Jan Müller-Wieland (1998).
• El Público, by Mauricio Sotelo (2014), premiered at the Teatro Real on February 24, 2015.

Bibliography

• Alberti, Rafael (1961). "El poeta español Rafael Alberti recita poemas de Federico García Lorca" (in español). Retrieved August 19, 2014. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
• Álvarez de Miranda, Ángel: «Poesía y religión», in Revista de Ideas Estéticas, vol. XI (1953), pp. 221–251.
• Budia, Mariam: «Aproximación a las estrategias creativas en Así que pasen cinco años: tiempo absoluto y subconsciente», in Teatro, Revista de Estudios Teatrales, no. 21 (2007).
• Colecchia, F.: García Lorca. A selectively annotated bibliography of criticism (New York–London, 1979).
• Fernández Cifuentes, Luis: García Lorca en el teatro: La norma y la diferencia (Zaragoza, 1986).
• García-Posada, Miguel: Lorca: Interpretación de «Poeta en Nueva York» (Madrid, 1982).
• Gibson, Ian: Federico García Lorca, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1985, 1987).
• Gil, Ildefonso-Manuel (ed.): Federico García Lorca (Madrid, 1973).
• Grande, Félix: García Lorca y el flamenco (Madrid, 1992).
• Laffranque, Marie: Les idées esthétiques de Federico García Lorca (Paris, 1967).
• Preston, Paul (2011). El holocausto español (in español). Trans.: Catalina Martínez Muñoz, Eugenia Vázquez Nacarino. Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores. ISBN 978-84-672-4533-2.
• Ramos-Gil, C.: Claves líricas de García Lorca: Ensayos sobre la expresión y los climas poéticos lorquianos (Madrid, 1967).
• Titos Martínez, Manuel (2005). Verano del 36 en Granada. Un testimonio inédito sobre el comienzo de la guerra civil y la muerte de García Lorca (in español). Granada: Atrio. ISBN 9788496101326.
• Rey Hazas, Antonio (2012). "Edición y estudio de Federico García Lorca". Bodas de Sangre (PDF) (in español). Barcelona: Vicens Vives. ISBN 978-84-682-0686-8.

External links

• Works by Federico García Lorca on Wikilivres (public domain in Canada)
• Web portal devoted to Lorca at the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.
• Digitized works by Federico García Lorca at the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the National Library of Spain
• Universo Lorca | Website dedicated to the life and work of Lorca and his connection with Granada. (Provincial Council of Granada)
• About Lorca, in moments from several installments of the La 2 (TVE) program A fondo, with Joaquín Soler Serrano.
• García Lorca, fuente de inspiración para el flamenco: broadcast of February 11, 2020, of Nuestro flamenco.
• La Clave Nº 160: "Muerte de García Lorca", program of La Clave broadcast on La 2 (TVE) on June 21, 1980, with José Luis Balbín.
• Desmontando mitos: El asesinato de Lorca y los falangistas La Falange
• La salvaje ejecución de Federico García Lorca, acusado por sus asesinos de “izquierdista, homosexual y masón” Infobae