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4 - From Pain to Prophecy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 March 2023
Summary
The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nation’s different reception of the Poetic Genius which is everywhere call’d the Spirit of Prophecy.
William BlakeMy bowels, my bowels!
I am pained at my very heart;
My heart maketh a noise in me;
I cannot hold my peace …
Jeremiah 4: 19Lorca’s mantic poet in New York
In a clear echo of the Passion Lorca refers in Poeta en Nueva York to his ‘voz de mi abierto costado’ (498) [voice of my open side], an allusion indicative of the speaking role he adopts in this volume as a poet–seer whose visionary gift – like that of Jeremiah, ‘the weeping prophet’ – is grounded in suffering. From the opening line, ‘Asesinado por el cielo’ (473) [Murdered by heaven], the dominant theme in this Lorca’s most avant-garde collection is suffering. Moreover, it is a suffering derived from, conditioned by and even acted out in a conspicuously religious context, as a number of titles indicate: ‘Iglesia abandonada’ [‘Abandoned Church’], ‘Navidad en el Hudson’ [‘Christmas on the Hudson’], ‘Nacimiento de Cristo’ [‘Birth of Christ’], ‘Grito hacia Roma’ [‘Shout towards Rome’] and ‘Crucifixión’ [‘Crucifixion’]. No less striking is the modulated voice and pitch that the poet consistently adopts to project his suffering, for this is based on a tradition that reaches back as far as poetry itself to a time when, as Blake indicates above, the roles of poet and prophet were virtually indistinguishable. ‘Así hablaba yo’ (499) [Thus spoke I], says Lorca in oracular vein as he emerges at the end of one poem from an agonized trance-like state; ‘Yo estaba en la terraza …’ (486) [There was I on the terrace …], he proclaims in another, ubicating himself as witness to the horror of New York; ‘¡oh salvaje Norteamérica!’ (486) [oh barbarous North America!], he admonishes the erring twentieth-century nation much as Isaiah chastized the house of Judah, ‘yo denuncio a toda la gente’ (516) [I denounce all the people]; ‘ya las cobras silbarán … ya la Bolsa será una pirámide de musgo’ (487) [now shall the cobras hiss … now shall the Stock Exchange be a pyramid of moss], he foretells the godhead’s retribution; ‘aleluya, aleluya’ (492), he interjects ironically; ‘No busquéis … Buscad … Aguardad’ (481–2) [Don’t look … Look … Wait], he directs the lost citizens of New York in the familiar imperative.
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- The Crucified MindRafael Alberti and the Surrealist Ethos in Spain, pp. 112 - 151Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2001