Gwynne Edwards' 'Lorca: Living in the Theatre' (2003). Part II

Gwynne Edwards, Lorca: Living in the Theatre. London and Chicago: Peter Owen, 2003.

The Public / El público (1930) -- first professional production, 1987, Madrid: 

"[T]he effect was a remarkably ghostlike setting, the characters existing in some disembodied world, and this was further heightened by the angles of lighting, which often illuminated only the sides of faces or created elongated shadows -- a mysterious, haunting, inner world, the darkened corner of the mind's recesses" (page 57).

When Five Years Pass / Así que pasen cinco años (1931): "Lorca was, for a variety of reasons, highly conscious of the passing of time and the inevitable consequences of this" (page 68). 

"' A great hand's taken her. / It must be the hand of God. / Don't bury me!'" (page 72).

". . . Lorca's play is much more sophisticated and polished than the Buñuel-Dalí film [Un Chien andalou, 1929], however much praise has been lavished on the latter. It [When Five Years Pass] illustrates Lorca's notion of a work of art as a journey, in this case a journey from day-dream and fantasy to bitter disillusionment. And in that respect it also has a coherence and a sense of the author's controlling hand which is at odds with [André] Breton's definition of Surrealism as spontaneous expression, free from the control of reason" (page 75).

Quoting Jan Fairley on the Edinburgh Fringe Festival production of When Five Years Pass in 1989: "Friends and phantoms intermingle so that there is no distinction between reality and fantasy. We are drawn into a constantly shifting present which re-plays itself through the past" (pages 82-83).

Blood Wedding / Bodas de sangre (1931): 

". . . Lorca was acutely conscious, through personal experience and cultural background, that the individual finds himself in an uncomprehending universe and at the mercy of a hostile fate in the face of which his deepest aspirations come to nothing and very often prove to be the source of his own downfall.  His vision is, of course, pessimistic, suggesting a world without hope, but in that sense it is typical of the twentieth century and places Lorca firmly alongside such dramatists as [Eugene] O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Samuel Beckett" (page 112).   

Today's Rune: Initiation.

Gwynne Edwards' 'Lorca: Living in the Theatre' (2003). Part I

Gwynne Edwards, Lorca: Living in the Theatre. London and Chicago: Peter Owen, 2003.

I have found this to be very helpful as a guide to plays by Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), and for a serious delving into Spanish and modern theatre in general. Of course, written plays go back to the ancient Greeks and are a hallmark of literacy. Ancient theatrical performances foreshadow cinema, television, YouTube and God knows what else that's coming in the future. Maybe time travel.

In Lorca: Living in the Theatre, Edwards focuses on six major plays, each given its own chapter. They are:

The Public / El público (1930)
When Five Years Pass / Así que pasen cinco años (1931)
Blood Wedding / Bodas de sangre (1931) 
Yerma (1934)
Doña Rosita the Spinster / Doña Rosita la soltera o El lenguaje de las flores (1935)
The House of Bernarda Alba / La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936)

The Public was so far ahead of its time that Lorca quipped even then: "This is for the theatre years from now." It was not performed until the 1970s; professionally, not until the 1980s (see pages 42-43 and 55+).

Edwards gives a brief overview of Lorca's formative time spent at the Residencia de Estudiantes (pages 44-46), which sounds like an ideal place to soak up and exchange new ideas and energies. World class lecturers came through (from Albert Einstein to H. G. Wells) and fellow students included the likes of Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) and Salvador Dalí (1904-1989).  

Edwards thereby discusses Lorca's "magpie approach in all his work" (page 47) -- meaning he drew from eclectic sources and styles, including Surrealism and Classical Theatre, visual art, dance, Gypsy and Arabic music and poetry, cinema and Catholicism. He was on fire!  

(To be continued). 

Today's Rune: Strength. 

Federico García Lorca, 'Poet in Spain' (2017): Part II

The center of Granada, Spain: Plaza de la Trinidad, summer of 2015

Continuing with Sarah Arvio's new Spanish-to-English translations in the bilingual Federico García Lorca, Poet in Spain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017). Part I can be found by this link.

From "Falseta:"

"Gente con el corazón / en la cabeza,"    (page 150)

"Folks with their hearts / in their heads" (page 151)

From "San Miguel / Granada:"

"Vienen manolas comiendo / semillas de girasloes, 

los culos grandes y ocultos / como planetas de cobre." (page 210)

"Flashy gals from Madrid / munch flower seeds

their big secret rumps / like coppery planets"   (page 211)

[Nota bene: "culos" = "asses"].

From "San Rafael / Córdoba:"

"vendedores de tabaco / huyen por el  roto muro."    (page 212)

"All the tobacco hawkers / flee through the broken wall" (page 213)

From "El poeta pide a su amor que le escriba" / "The Poet Asks His Love to Write to Him:"

"Corazón interior no necesita / la miel helada que la luna vierte." (page 338)

"An inner heart does not need / the icy honey spilled by the moon (page 339)

I also dig Arvio's translation of Lorca's play, Bodas de sangre / Blood Wedding (1932) which helped me better grok the Moon (pages 452-453) and the "Mendiga / Beggar" (pages 454+).

Repeating from Part I about this book: Fun and fascinating in the sun, under the moon or even by electric light, it is. 

Today's Rune: Protection.

Federico García Lorca, 'Poet in Spain' (2017): Part I

¡Ved qué locura! ~ Isn't it wild? Last night, I finished reading Sarah Arvio's new Spanish-to-English translations in the bilingual Federico García Lorca, Poet in Spain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017). Spanish is on the left of the main body of text, English on the right. Fun and fascinating in the sun or under the moon or even by electric light, it is. 

Arvio has chosen representative samples of Lorca's Spanish poetry and his play, Bodas de sangre / Blood Wedding (1932). His New York City poems are not included.

Things that popped out at me follow. He makes it seems so simple.

Imagery in"Claro de reloj" / "Space in the Clock" -- "where the stars / struck the twelve floating / black numbers" (page 3).

First and last line of "Pan:" 
"¡Ved qué locura!" that Arvio translates as "How wild!" (pages 12-13). Machine translation: "See what madness!"

From "Serentata:"
Lolita lava su cuerp / con agua salobre y nardos (page 24) =
Lolita washes her body / with white nard and brine" (page 25).

What, pray tell (I thought upon first reading), is nardos / nard in this context? Apparently, Spikenard, incidentally a part of the heraldry of Pope Francis, a flowering plant that has a Phoenician trace as "Indian narde," originating in the Himalayas. 

Nardostachys jatamansi / Nard

Lorca likes the word and the image.  

From "Segungo aniversario" / "Second Anniversary:"

"Oh you alone  wandering / in the last room of the night" (pages 48-49).

This is cool, from "Nocturnos de la ventna" / "Window Nocturnes:"

"Los instantes heridos / por el reloj . . . pasaban" 
"The moments wounded / by the clock -- went by --"   (pages 70-71). 

I'll aim to wrap this up in the next post.

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. Illustration of nardo: Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) - Curtis's Botanical Magazine, Vol. 107, series 3, number 37, table 6564. Wiki Commons. 

  

Mystic Chords of Memory

"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." ~ US President Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861. Full text here.

Memory, like dreaming, is often highly emotionally charged. There's the Proustian memory trigger -- a deep memory surfaces due to a scent, a sound, a person who resembles someone from the past (or future, if it's a premonition); or the memory reminder, like a photograph, journal entry, memory-laden discussion, written communication or voice mail. Often just a person's name or thinking about a certain time or place will conjure up a memory, or a slew of them. 

Memories often conflict or prove paradoxical. I recently finished Ian Gibson's Federico García Lorca: A Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989) and what was made very clear in it is that different people remembered Lorca differently, even from the same event, based partly on how well they knew him, how they felt about him, how much time had elapsed, and what they wanted to remember about him. 

So I thought I'd post a sampling of remembered people, times and places. If the context of a situation is not viscerally recalled, the details seem vaguer. Let's give it a try, shall we?

When I was a teenager, I met Ariana Bracalente at an amusement park in Virginia -- not randomly but through Marc Pinotti, a mutual friend. She was a little older than I was, an exciting development at the time. She was smart, astute and interesting; her mother was a nurse and they were Catholic. We were close for some time, and wrote lots of letters. The last time I saw her was at a football game, also in Virginia, and she was taking pictures with, if I remember correctly, a Nikon with zoom lens. Ah, youth!

In my early twenties, I met a handful of much older German fellows at Normandy, in France. They were celebrating their "alive day." On June 6-7, 1944, then draftees in the Wehrmacht, they rather wisely surrendered to Canadian assault forces as fast as they could and, obviously, survived the war. With some college friends from Chapel Hill, we shared bottles of wine and were all singing by the end of the night. Though we only saw them over a period of two days, they made a lasting impression. Three names stick with me: Willi Wiederstein from near Düsseldorf, Karl and Helmut. Luckily, I'm still excellent friends with one of the American college students who also experienced this exchange firsthand.

When I was living in Philadelphia, while a graduate student at Temple University, I came to know a number of intelligent and fun people from Vietnam, China, India, Germany, Russia, Canada, England, France, Spain, Italy and Thailand, among other places. One of the many, Nga Mai, an edgy (and rather striking in appearance) entrepreneur and restaurateur, hired me occasionally to cover her Diva Café, right across the way from my apartment at 1225 Spruce Street; sometimes we'd play chess and talk about Hannah Arendt or Camille Paglia, who was teaching nearby at the University of the Arts. Nga and her two sisters had come to the USA with their Catholic mother, starting in Omaha, Nebraska; their father remained in Vietnam after the Americans departed. We stayed in touch for a while after I left the city, after she closed Diva and opened up a couple of new places over by Rittenhouse Square. At Diva, she would explain to people how to remember conceptualizing and spelling her first name: "like National Golf Association." (Which in turn reminds me of Stuart Basefsky, a librarian mentor from Duke University, now at Cornell University's School of Industry and Labor Relations, who would say his last name to newcomers and explain, "like Base and Sky with an F in the middle." Like I sometimes say, when people ask, "Erik with a k.")

Also in Philadelphia, I unexpectedly came to know Lu Ping from the People's Republic of China in a history class. She was an English teacher when back in China. Her stories about her father, who was very old by then, and his experiences during the Long March were remarkable. Only later did I realize that her name could be better understood in reverse, as Ping Lu.

When I moved to Detroit, there were additional new waves of people to meet. Like mustard seeds, some took hold and some didn't. I remember early on, upon the first occasion of meeting David J. Thompson, an English instructor then and a wandering poet and photographer now. This is primarily because of the specific context: I was seated at his flimsy card table, slowly sinking into wet clay, enclosed within a Japanese-style courtyard designed in the 1950s by Minoru Yamasaki. Thompson had on the table a 1995 book, which I asked about: Dennis Covington's Salvation on Sand Mountain, a fascinating memoir about snake-handlers and old time religion in the American South. (Side memory: for some reason Thompson hated Abraham Lincoln). The last time I saw him was at Steve's Back Room, a Middle Eastern Restaurant in Saint Clair Shores. By this time, several years after the first introductions, we both were working on laptops at separate tables, and I was moving to Texas; outside, there was snow on the ground.  

Also in metro Detroit, there was another English instructor (among many) on another occasion -- a regular bar night for artists and educators -- that I recall, from a couple years later. In this case, it was the unusual name that stuck: Carroll Louis Goossen, Jr. I wondered why whoever was in charge of given names in the Goossen clan flipped the name from a literary salute to Lewis Carroll, author of Through the Looking Glass, to such an awful appendage? This to me was as strange as the Lu Ping/Ping Lu flip or Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue." Then again, the "real" name of Lewis Carroll was actually Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. 

The last time I saw Cal was probably at Macomb Community College, where for a while I taught Writing, English, Poetry and the (International) Novel as an adjunct -- (I was working full time as a librarian elsewhere). 

For now, I'll end with a relevant snippet about people's names from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), Chapter Six:

'"My name is Alice, but — "
"It's a stupid name enough!" Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. "What does it mean?"
"Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully.
"Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: "my name means the shape I am — and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost."' Indeed.

Dear reader, how do you remember people and their names? 

Today's Rune: Strength.

In the Last Refuge of Federico García Lorca, Granada (Spain): Part II

The center of Granada, Spain: Plaza de la Trinidad, summer of 2015. The nearby Hotel Reina Cristina was, in the summer of 1936, the home of the prosperous Rosales family; the men of the family -- even poet Luis Rosales  -- having joined the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista fascist nationalists [in a more English form, the Traditionalist Spanish Falange and Juntas of the Nationalist Offensive], were nonetheless friends of the celebrated Granadan poet Federico García Lorca, and so he took refuge there, where all of them thought he'd be safe from more bloodthirsty Falangist elements. (Lorca was gay, one of the reasons he was specifically targeted for death).

August 10, 1936: Lorca "read notices . . . of more executions behind the Alhambra. He took time to study in the library, finding a medieval Spanish poet who enchanted him and whose verses he read aloud to the family. He thought of a poem to be composed with Luis . . ."  - Steven Nightingale, Granada: A Pomegranate in the Hand of God  (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2015), page 303. 

On August 16, 1936, Lorca's brother-in-law, mayor of Granada, was executed by Falangists. "That afternoon, police and military forces swarmed around the Rosaleses' house, occupying the block, watching from rooftops, taking up positions in the Plaza de la Trinidad. Esperanza Rosales, the matriarch of the family, refused to surrender [Federico] . . ." (Ibid.)

But they got him, despite attempts at protection by the Rosales family and by higher-ups, who were too late to spare him. 

In the early morning hours of August 18, 1936, the poet Federico García Lorca, a schoolteacher, and two matadors were taken to a village outside of Granada and shot, just before dawn. 

To these men, and to those still being killed in similar circumstances today, as in Bangladesh and around the world, a salute and an adieu. Let freedom ring!

Today's Rune: Fertility.  

In the Last Refuge of Federico García Lorca, Granada (Spain): Part I

In June of 2015 (this past June), by way of kismet, or fate, or Divine Providence, or luck, my mother and I stayed at the Hotel Reina Cristina in the center of Granada, Spain. This stay had been arranged by an AAA travel agent back in North Carolina (yes, travel agents still exist). We had no idea upon our arrival at 3 a.m. (that's another story for another time) that the Hotel Reina Cristina was the former residence of the Rosales family, the last refuge of Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), the celebrated poet whose life was cut short during the Spanish Civil War -- death by firing squad.  The above cabinet in the lobby features several items relating to Lorca. 

Hallway on the first floor, Hotel Reina Cristina (former Rosales residence), Granada.

Rosales family piano in what is now a main breakfast area deep inside the hotel.

A third floor corner of this large, well-appointed and beautiful structure.

Hotel Reina Cristina tapestry, "1892 / 1986."  In the next post, a few more details to add. Lorca has been in the news again -- the search for his remains continues, even in 2015. 

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

The Spanish Civil War: A Documentary (Part II)

The Spanish Civil War (Brother Against Brother) Written, Produced, Directed and Narrated by Mike Leighton; Cromwell Productions, 1995 (2001 DVD). The Last Great Cause. Continued.

This documentary cites four poets, all of them fatalities as a direct result of the war.

Antonio Machado (1875-1939)'s “El crimen fue en Granada / The Crime Took Place in Granada” is an homage to Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), murdered with apparent relish by a Francoist goon squad because he was gay as well as pro-Republic. 

From John Cornford's (1915-1936) “Poem” (to Margot Heinemann):

And if bad luck should lay my strength
Into the shallow grave,
Remember all the good you can;
Don't forget my love.

In the course of the film, Cornford's “Full Moon at the Tierz” is also recited.

Two poems by Miguel Hernández are featured: “Recoged esta voz  / Hear This Voice” and “Vientos del pueblo me llevan/ The Winds of the People” It's all very sad, the human condition.  

Today's Rune: Wholeness.