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As
the months of this 26th
year in the 21st century
stream forward, I have the
eerie sensation of a life
lived and a life lost.
100 years ago it was 1926.
Sometimes for me "100
years ago"is an
ancient time almost
untouchable. But not this
time. The 1920's and
the 2020's are
glassine images laying on
one another. I read and
listen to three writers
from the 1920's as
they speak to me now: the
novelist F. Scott
Fitzgerald, the playwright
Eugene O'Neill, and
the poet-playwright
Federico García Lorca.
It is Lorca... whose voice
carries into my dreams,
awake and asleep, who
gives me a present
perspective today of a
world that was beginning
to decay and now is
looking at its end. (He
was assassinated in 1936,
the year that O'Neill
was awarded the Nobel
prize and Fitzgerald wrote The Crackup,
one of his last au
revoirs.)
For all of his intense and
edgy writing, Lorca was a
lyrical poet, It has
always been difficult to
translate his Spanish into
English because
translations can never
capture the nuances and
physical sensations of the
original. If you want to
hear and embrace a
poet's voice, learn
his language.
Nevertheless...
Poet In New York -
Poeta en Nueva York
The 2008 translation in English by Pablo
Medina and Mark Statman is
considered by many to be
one of the best. Here is
why in the Foreword by
Edward Hirsch:
Foreword
Federico García Lorca
spent a critical nine
months in New York (June
1929–March 1930),
and created from the
experience an indelible
work of art, an agonized
spiritual tribute to the
urban milieu, a ferocious
testament. Lorca was
extremely energized and
deeply appalled by the
city he
discovered—its
“extrahuman
architecture and furious
rhythm,” its
“geometry and
anguish”—and
the work he left behind
still carries a sense of
shock and surprise, a
weird feeling of
recognition, after all
this time.
Pablo Medina and Mark
Statman have given us a
marvelous new version of
Lorca’s anguished
masterpiece, Poet in New York.
The destruction of the
twin towers of the World
Trade Center, the wake of
September 11, 2001, sent
them back to the great
poetry of New York City,
especially Lorca’s
fiery symphonic cycle,
which was mostly created
in the midst of the Great
Depression. Lorca spoke of
“a poet in New
York,” but he
recognized that he might
just as well have said
“New York in a
poet.” So, too, we
might say that New York
has lived inside these
translators, two poets who
have recast his work in
the light of a traumatized
American city. Lorca had
at different times
considered calling his
book The City (La Ciudad) and Introduction to Death (Introducción a la
muerte) and,
indeed, death and the city
are its twin inspiring
presences, which is one of
the reasons that Medina
and Statman find it so
disturbingly relevant.
Their translation is a
major reclamation. They
have given us a Poet in New York for our time.
Lorca always recalled his
stay in New York as
“one of the most
useful experiences”
of his life. It was his
first trip abroad. He
called New York
“Senegal with
machines” and said
that all of his native
Granada could fit into
three skyscrapers. He felt
“murdered by the
sky.” He was stunned
by the vastness and scale
of the city, which was for
him a place where during
the day people were mired
in mindless games,
fruitless labors, and at
dusk poured into the
streets in a human flood.
Lorca’s tenderness
was affronted by the
unforgiving angles and
buildings. He was
disoriented and carried
off by the terrible
rootlessness of the
crowds, and he spoke of
his unimaginable sadness,
of being an “armless
poet, lost/in the vomiting
crowd.”
Lorca’s vision of
the crowd was influenced
both by Walt Whitman who,
he said, “searched
it for solitudes”
and by T. S. Eliot who
squeezed everything out of
it “like a
lemon.” Poet in New York is part “Song of Myself,” part “The Waste Land.”
The poet in Lorca’s
urban cycle is an intense
flâneur—enraptured,
enraged—who wanders
all over New York City.
Lorca’s favorite
neighborhood was Harlem,
where he heard African
American spirituals and
jazz tunes that reminded
him of Spanish folk music,
especially his beloved canto jondo (“deep song”), traditional flamenco. His wanderings took him from the Upper West Side, where he lived in a series of residence halls at Columbia University, to Coney Island (“Landscape of the Vomiting Crowd”); he found his way from Riverside Drive to Battery Place (“Landscape of the Urinating Crowd”) and over the Brooklyn Bridge (“City Without Sleep”). He was on Wall Street on the day of the stock market crash and afterward claimed to have seen six people commit suicide during Black Tuesday. There he felt, to an unprecedented degree, “the sensation of real death, death without hope.” Lorca was staggered by the suffering around him, the greed, the anthropocentrism of urban life, and he responded with a series of phantasmagoric images, such as the opening of his “Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge”:
“I have come from
the countryside,”
Lorca said, “and do
not believe that man is
the most important thing
of all.” He was
dumbfounded by the daily
slaughter of animals,
which he described as
“a river of tender
blood.” He captured
his disgust in “New
York (Office and
Denunciation),”
where he wrote:
“Every day in New
York, they slaughter/four
million ducks,/five
million pigs,/two thousand
doves for the pleasure of
the dying,/a million
cows,/a million lambs,/and
two million roosters/that
leave the sky in
splinters.” He
denounces “the
endless trains of
milk,/the endless trains
of blood,” and
becomes a bitter prophet
who works himself into a
frenzy of condemnation and
offers himself up as a
sacrifice:
No, no. I denounce.
I denounce the conspiracy of those deserted offices
swept clean of agony,
that erase the designs of the forest,
and I offer myself to be eaten by the crushed cows
when their screams fill the valley
where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.
“Being born in
Granada,” Lorca once
said, “has given me
a sympathetic
understanding of all those
who are
persecuted—the
Gypsy, the black, the Jew,
the Moor, which all
Granadans have inside
them.” He identified
with those on the edges,
the periphery. Lorca was
thunderstruck by the
racism he found in the New
World (“Oh Harlem!
Harlem!/There is no
anguish compared to your
oppressed reds”),
and the theme of racial
injustice, of social
inequity, runs like a
current through Poet in New York. He wanted to write, as he put it, “the poem of the black race in North America,” and he struggled to understand, as he later told an interviewer, “a world shameless and cruel enough to divide people by color when in fact color is the sign of God’s artistic genius.”
The city Lorca discovered
on his many solitary walks
becomes in his book a
prototype of the
twentieth-century urban
world. Lorca’s
diagnosis still holds as
he inveighs against our
hostility to nature,
“the painful slavery
of both men and
machines,” the
agonizing social
injustice, and the
indifference to suffering
that seems to permeate the
very atmosphere. Yet there
is also a great exuberance
underlying Lorca’s
nocturnes and morning
songs, his furious rambles
that took him all over New
York City. The testament
he left behind is a fierce
indictment of the modern
world incarnated in city
life, but it is also a
wildly imaginative and
joyously alienated
declaration of residence.
—Edward Hirsch
* * *
For me... the sensation of a life lived and a life lost.
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