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| Federico García Lorca, gardening (June 5, 1898 - August 19, 1936) |
GARCÍA LORCA: THE POET, THE ARTIST
By Arturo Mantecón
80 years ago, Federico García Lorca was hauled out to the rural outskirts of Granada with a passel of Reds, republicans, and assorted anti-Franquistas, shot in the back of the head, then thrown in a ditch and covered with earth, a grave undiscovered to this day.
A tremendous lyrical poet whose work was marveled at then as much as it is now, García Lorca was also an extraordinary plastic artist. He drew and colored fascinating images that were at times, playful and charming, sinister and dreadful, and disturbingly sexual. Some of his drawings illustrated personal letters, others served as book dedications; a few adorned his poems and plays, and many stood alone as works of art. Over 350 of García Lorca’s drawings survive in museums, galleries, in private hands, and as part of the Lorca family collections.
García Lorca considered his drawings to be poetic expressions, a sort of charcoal and crayon sketched verse:
“I have thought about and produced these little drawings with a poetic-plastic or plastic-poetic criterion…And many are lineal metaphors or sublimated commonplaces…I have tried to choose the essential features of form and emotion, or of super-reality or super-form, to turn them into a symbol that, like a magic key, might help us better understand the reality they possess in the world.”
García Lorca’s drawings, considered as an integral whole, were poetic expressions in a personal, primordial, visceral language, and, as we know, it is impossible to navigate any language (even our own) without interpreting it, without translating it.
The translation of the drawings of García Lorca is the artistic task that I have set for myself. I am planning a book containing 25 or more of them, and present here a few examples that will hopefully benefit the “reader” of his drawings.
Paseo de una avispa por mi cualto*
Una avispa,
canary yellow
mothbird of a wasp,
un día entró
por mi ventana,
my window that gives out
to a displacement
of other shutters
other curtains
potted plants
and iron rejas as thin
as wisps of telaraña,
hilos de seda filtrando
the bright triangles
de los colores primarios
drawn like bolts of cloth
from the sky of Granada.
The wasp came through my window
and blacktraced over table
staged with the pearlmothered
almejas de mis secretos,
blacktraced its volition in that
screaming
hymenopteral instant
in which time spirals
about its navel
and preterite wasp of lingering
is eyed con la avispa del presente,
y dibujaba al azar
el fantasma incompleto
describing the lapidary
cross-etched tumba
of my fate.
*Cualto, for cuarto. Lorca was transcribing the speech of common folk in Andalucia where “r” is often confused with “l,” particularly right before another consonant.
Portrait of Salvador Dalí
¡Ay mi amor!
I sing the colors
of your palette,
cobalt of sea
tigre de sol
blood of fish
and the jet and anchor
of wounding peñascos
that front the shores
of the forbidding
golden numbers
of your snailing mind
¡Ay mi amor!
olivaceous voice
green and black
unction
profunda y suave
like the flux,
the slow
tidal back and forth,
the circular
game of the goose
de nuestro amor
¡Ay mi amor!
Starfish wizard,
palette pierced
by phallic thumb,
grand masturbator,
hygienic sex
ever at hand,
los peces prisioneros
devouring the creams
from the fingers
that sharp define
your light-born dreams
¡Ay mi amor!
You would flee,
flee
the sexual forest,
flee
from our nights stalked
by the fantastic
misshapen beasts
of my conjuring,
porque te dolía
demasiado
¡Ay mi amor!
because it hurt
too much.
A Hand
The eradicated hand
está flotando
en la susurrada brisa
de una mañana dominguera,
pinching between
forefinger and thumb
its blood-beaded
vegetal airfoils
of frondlike,
wooly caterpillars
--tuertas pero no ciegas--
as they slowly inch
through the thankful,
cloudless,
blue and calcite
sky.
The little boy´s hand
— the hand of the boy freshly planted—
trails the whiskered dendrites
of earthly attachment
and ascends
para palpar
y leer
las yerbas y fruta
que crecen en la luna.
Art Mantecón is a poet, translator and fiction writer. His short stories have been published in The Americas Review, Café Bellas Artes, Bliss, and the Dunes Review and in Somos en escrito along with his poetry. His translations have been published in Poetry Now, Left Curve, and Skidrow Penthouse. Art has published translations of two books of selected poems by Spanish poet Leopoldo Panero: My Naked Brain (Swan Scythe Press, 2011) and Like an eye in the hand of a beggar (Editions Michel Eyquem, 2013), the latter featured in Somos en escrito.