Introduction: Self-Consciously Lorca

Summary

Federico je n’ai vu qu’une fois ton visage

Dans un journal à trente centimes d’avant la guerre

De celui-là je ne me souviens guère

Mais ta face éternelle est partout chez moi

(René Guy Cadou, ‘Bonjour Federico’)

My first profound experience of Lorca – my first real contact – occurred as I leafed through a copy of Romancero gitano on a bench on Bristol’ Brandon Hill, the Cabot Tower looking down at me from above as the tower of the church upon the Sacramonte rose towards me from the pages of the poem ‘San Miguel (Granada)’. The first two stanzas, in particular, were revelatory:

Se ven desde las barandas,

por el monte, monte, monte,

mulos y sombras de mulos

cargados de girasoles.

Sus ojos en las umbrías

se empañan de inmensa noche.

en los recodos del aire,

cruje la aurora salobre. (OC, I, p. 410)

I had no idea that the poem was an ‘encoded description of the festivities on September 29th, when the people of Granada would go in pilgrimage to the church of St Michael that stands on top of the […] hill that rises above the old Moorish quarter of the Albaicín.’ Nor that these ‘opening lines are a description and evocation of this ascent, which was quite commonly made by mule’; nor still, that ‘sunflowers are, by local custom, particularly linked to the celebration of the saint’ day’ (Harris 1991, p. 42). But I was overjoyed at my realization of the image – so simple and ingenious (neogongorine, no doubt) – and at my sudden transportation to another, penumbral, location where the distant yellow of sunflowers on the barely perceptible dark backs of climbing mules was at once the earliest haze of the yellowy hues of dawn competing with the dominion of the night.

It is not easy to separate the simplicity from the ingenuity, although I might try by pointing to the contrast between the unremarkable lexis and the remarkable implications of its combined effect.