The centenary of the birth of Federico Garcia Lorca is being celebrated this year throughout not only the Spanish-speaking world but wherever a love of poetry and drama still survives. He is Spain's W.B. Yeats: he possesses that kind of towering reputation and, like Yeats, he was as engrossed by theatre as he was by poetry. His deliberate murder by Nationalist militia at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, finally revealed as such by Ian Gibson in his The Assassination of Federico Garcia Lorca (1971), adds further fascination to an already intriguing life.
Lorca was born in 1898 in the village of Fuente Vaqueros in the Andalusian province of Granada. His father was a financially comfortably-off farmer, his mother an ex-schoolteacher. Ian Gibson's standard biography of Lorca's life (1989) paints a picture of an exceptionally happy childhood of an exceptionally talented child. Lorca grew up in an atmosphere of indulgent, extended-family love. As with Gerard Manley Hopkins, music and painting as well as literature were part of the family ambience.
In most respects his life was the life of the Andalusian farming bourgeoisie of the time. What is important to bear in mind is the almost feudal, organic nature of that kind of society, the sense of paternal duty, however rare it may have been in practice, which the conscientious large farmer felt towards his farmhands. When growing up, Lorca would have felt a strong bond with the rural world - its landscapes, its animals, its people and their traditional ways - in which he found himself. That bond, though weakened at times as he reached out to the larger world, remained crucially firm throughout Lorca's life and is arguably the core of his strength - the "greatrooted blossomer" of Yeats's poem. As Ian Gibson describes it, the work of Lorca "puts us in touch with our emotions and reminds us forcefully, in a world ever more computerised and machine-controlled, that we are an integral part of Nature - a Nature that we all too often forget".
The contentious question that is obligatory to raise is, was Lorca homosexual? Is his poetry, if not his plays, preoccupied with homosexual concerns? Should his poetry be read, as it so often has been read, by some almost exclusively, in a homosexual context, determining interpretation of his poems, preferring one reading of them rather than another?
The opinion of Lorca's friend, Martinez Nadal, expressed in an interview in ABC in 1992, seems to me the most balanced view of the matter. "For all of us who knew him," Nadal says (and I summarise in translation), "it was impossible to be ignorant of his initial bisexuality and later of his definite choice of homosexuality. And it must be admitted that there was a good deal of understandable and pardonable hypocrisy. But in act and gesture Lorca never displayed the least sign of effeminacy, was never on the look-out for conquests and never did anything to embarrass his family and friends. In his poetry, however, far from concealing his sexual inclinations, he proclaims and defends them, but in the context of an all-embracing love that almost lacks gender." Nadal also takes issue with Ian Gibson, denying that the social climate of Lorca's Madrid was any more repressive of homosexuals than London (Nadal spent most of his life in Oxford after 1934).
He also points to the literary freedom enjoyed by Spanish writers of the time, which he believes to have been in general greater than that enjoyed by writers in Britain or France. That said, Nadal's comments should be taken in the context of a liberal intelligentsia; provincial Granada during Lorca's time would provide a very different context.
In his plays, as indeed in a great deal of his poetry, Lorca's primary concern is the disaster of repressed love. In perhaps the most poignant of Lorca's plays, The House of Bernarda Alba, there is an almost suffocating sense of the torture of frustrated desire as the noose of social convention tightens around the necks of its principal characters. The irony is that the strangler, who is also a self-strangler, is the mother-figure, Bernarda herself, a figure one normally thinks of in terms of life-giving love and compassion.
Lorca, notwithstanding the vigorous persuasion of Roy Campbell and others, was never a simple, much less a local, poet who got lost for a time in the big complex world of avant-garde experimentation, as demonstrated, it is alleged, by Poet in New York. On the contrary, from the beginning Lorca was a conscious literary craftsman who delighted in experimentation. His Gypsy Ballads, however it struck and still strikes many readers, is not simply folk stuff, but work that is as elaborately wrought as the romances or ballads of that consummate master of the baroque, Luis de Gongora, Lorca's favourite poet of the siglo de oro. Nowhere is this more evident than in Lorca's Tamarit Poems (Diwan del Tamarit) in which Lorca returns to Andalusian material, specifically to his native city of Granada, for images and atmosphere, among other things. And it is also true that traditional ballad rhythms can once more be heard in the fascinatingly enigmatic gacelas and casidas of this book, which may in the end turn out to be Lorca's masterpiece.
(On a personal note, it was my pleasure and honour some weeks ago, at a banquete de homenaje for Lorca given by the Spanish Ambassador to Ireland, to present a copy of my translation of The Tamarit Poems to President Mary McAleese whose Spanish, readers might like to know, is as excellent as her courtesy.)
Lorca's sense of humour should never be lost sight of. He was a thoroughly theatrical person who delighted in the captivation of an audience. By all accounts his poetry readings were stunning performances. Socially, he was equally entertaining and he had a large repertoire of talents, including music.
Interestingly, the great Argentinian storyteller, Jorge Luis Borges, misunderstood this side of Lorca's character. Of their one meeting in Buenos Aires, where Lorca was extravagantly feted, Borges says: "Lorca wanted to astonish us. He said to me that he was very much troubled about a very important character in the contemporary world - a character in whom one could see all the tragedy of American life. And then he went on in this way until I asked him who the character was, and it turned out the character was Mickey Mouse." Borges was not amused. "I suppose he was trying to be clever," he continues. "And I thought, that's the kind of thing you might say when you are very young and you want to astonish somebody. But after all, he was a grown man, he had no need, he could have talked in a different way."
Lorca did not "go gentle into that good night", but was brutally murdered. All his adult life he was hyper-acutely aware of death's constant nearness to him, its presence hovering even in his most vibrantly vital work. Yet there is nothing depressing about Lorca's work; rather, it is persistently life-enhancing despite the material with which it often deals. And this enlarges the horror of picturing Lorca during his last days as he hid in the house of his friend Luis Rosales, confused and terrified, yet, with a kind of childish innocence, refusing to believe that anyone would want to kill him.
Lorca's reputation, like that of Yeats, has withstood the test of time and the vagaries of literary fashion. Despite the local trappings of the one and the occultism of the other, there is a universality of appeal at the core of the work of both poets: the need to love and be loved, the tragedy of lost love, the horror of death. And, perhaps more importantly, there is the sheer beauty of the words both poets put on paper. In his lecture at Trinity College, which preceded the dinner of homage mentioned above, Ian Gibson rightly lamented the fact that no recording of Lorca reading his work has come to light. How wonderful indeed it would be to hear the voice of Lorca. Yet how fortunate we are that that magnificent voice of his reaches us still, through his published works, from beyond the grave.
Michael Smith is a poet, translator and publisher