Federico Garcia Lorca - Poet in New York: A Bilingual Edition

Ala Nena (P.M.) For Katherine and Jesse (M.S.) xi xv VI. INTRODUCTION ALA MUERTE VI. INTRODUCTION TO DEATH IX. HUIDA DE NUEVA YORK IN. FLIGHT FROM NEW YORK Federico Garcia 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 It, 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 (Introduccion 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. S. 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 flaneur- 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: "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 Grandians 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 hos tility 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

Already a well-known poet and dramatist in his native Spain, Federico Garcia Lorca arrived in New York in August 1929, at age thirty-one, in time to witness the collapse of the stock market that sent the city into a tailspin and much of the world into the Great Depression. That October he experienced firsthand the despair of people who had lost everything.

He saw the suicides splayed on the sidewalks. He sensed a city on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. Depressed and grieving over the results of a broken love affair, Lorca had been eager to reach the city and throw himself into its streets. He had read accounts of the grandeur, bustle, and diversity of the great metropolis and seen its images projected on movie screens. What he found had little to do with what he had read or seen. New York was larger and more consuming than any other city he knew.

It was abrasive, dirty, caustic, cold, shadowy, and dangerous; in short, it was an analog of hell as terrifying as any depicted in literature or art to that time. All of what he experienced on the streets of the city, however, paled before the horror he felt on Wall Street, where, he wrote in an essay, "rivers of gold arrived from all parts of the earth, and with it death. Nowhere else on earth but there can one feel the total absence of the spirit." Coming to rid himself of grief, he encounters an abundance of grief; coming to witness the power of human endeavor, he finds inhumanity, tragedy, failure. Seventy years later, those of us who had seen the twin towers of the World Trade Center rise over the cityscape and accepted them, reluctantly, as symbols of New York's vigor and permanence found it difficult to witness how easily they came down, how the raw materials of our daily lives-glass, steel, concrete, and human flesh-could, in the space of two hours, turn to rubble: "Murdered by the sky./Among the forms that move toward the snake/and the forms searching for crystal...." Their weakness was our weakness, their impermanence our impermanence. For weeks after the disaster, smoke and dust filled the air, and the prevailing winds carried them uptown to the Bronx, east toward Brooklyn and Queens, west toward New Jersey. That smoke had the strangest smell of wrecked buildings and decaying bodies, which we tried to avoid by closing our windows, by wearing ineffective felt masks, or by holding handkerchiefs to our faces.