With his mother’s last name, he has a universal identity, with his father’s, common, much less so. In its full name it is the hole, the blood and breath of art that was born in Granada 125 years ago to explode in words, shapes and sounds that appeared and remained to make our lives more bearable. Federico García Lorca inspires loyalty and admiration among those who know how to read and listen to him, and follow the traces of his short existence, overwhelmed by the emotions that come with knowing him.

I went through phases focused on his work. Adolescents read sharing their voices, A bloody wedding and Bernarda Alba’s house; students were more mature to understand infertile, a contemporary tragedy; all running fits over the lines of their ballads, though I stopped them to appreciate the notes of high suggestion in that “green to love you green / green wind and green branches” or felt the vibes of the long line when he said, “You’ve been looking for an act that’s like the river,/the bull and the dream that joins the wheel to the sea-grass,” questioning Walt Whitman.

links of the chain

I know that it is easy to stay with a poet of the first years – a minor, Book of poems, Cante jondo poems– but less to internalize the features that opt ​​for mystery and opt for the most secret possibilities of poetry –Gypsy Ballads, Poet in New York, Tamarit’s Divan-. What pleases this author is that the musicality of his work, the emanations of meaning that emanate from it, without logical explanation (what he so meaningfully called duende), capture the reader who does not protest against immediate misunderstanding and is carried away by the sounds.

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Because he played the piano, he composed songs; as he naturally drew, he drew scenes and covers (his signature itself was an ornament); As he was a man of the theater, he wrote, acted and directed in that cultural feat of the Spanish Republic that was La barraca. All this can be traced in the various biographies written about his avatar, especially in the titles of Ian Gibson, the scholar who knows Lorca best, even though he is not Spanish.

(…) Latin America got to know him directly through the time he spent in Cuba, Uruguay and Argentina…

As for the theater, it is pleasant to remember that Latin America got to know him directly through his passage through Cuba, Uruguay and Argentina, listening to him recite and teach. What remains is his correspondence in which he tells his mother about the satisfaction of making money with his art, after being bullied by his family for being useless.

These days, when we remember it, the words of the Canadian singer Leonard Cohen, who set the song to music, come to mind Little Viennese Waltz and he asked the Spaniards that they had not with their own hands excavated the land of Granada to find his remains. Because that reality is inglorious, that dark hole in the history of the country that is proud of the universal brilliance of one of its most colorful authors, but there is no grave in which to honor him. The execution of Lorca by Falangist forces, the dumping of his body by the side of a road that was never named, mourns the admirers and inheritors of his literary veneration. He is one of those writers who will never be far away, no matter how much time passes. As it was said about Gardel, “every time he sings better”, every time I read Federico, he talks to me, his Novia, Bernarda, Adela actualize eternal feelings. (OR)