ME AND LORCA
ME:
Why is it impossible to break the grief?
Why is it impossible to break the grief?
Neither burn nor sink it?
Brother, why does grief never die?
Why can pain be ever terrible?
LORCA:
As if the dawn after a dark night,
As if the dawn after a dark night,
May we need to suffer.
Dear, if there is no grief in the world,
A joy may not deserve dignity.
--tr. Asror Allayarov from "The Gate Opened by Angels"
El beso (The Kiss) -- Salvador Dalí
Amor (Love) -- Federico Lorca
On 17 July 1936 general Francisco Franco revolted against Spain’s leftist government. In April 1939 he declared himself the country’s Caudillo (dictator), after more than 500,000 Spaniard deaths in the civil war; another 400,000 spent time in concentration camps between 1939 and 1947, thousands more were executed by firing squad or garrotte, and a half million fled the country. A cabal of military officers seized control of poet Federico García Lorca’s home town, Granada, 3 days after the conflict began. Official records described him as a “socialist and a freemason” who was suspected of “homosexual and abnormal practices.” After police carried out 2 searches on his home he fled to a friend’s house out of fear. On 16 August officers surrounded the house where he was hiding and taken into custody, on the same day that 30 people, including his brother-in-law the Socialist mayor, were executed by firing squad in a cemetery in the city; more than a thousand were summarily executed there that year. Two days later Lorca, plus a teacher and 2 bullfighters, anarchists who had led the city’s resistance to the military takeover, were driven before daylight past a children’s summer camp called La Colonia (another killing ground) and then taken for a paseo (a stroll) and executed, then buried in an unmarked grave on the outskirts of Alfacar, a village 5 miles away. One of the members of his death squad reported that he had “fired two bullets into his ass for being a queer.” Lorca’s writings were banned until 1954 and censored until 1975. Eventually, after Franco’s death in 1976, a nearby park was dedicated “To the memory of Federico García Lorca and all the victims of the civil war;” various Lorca verses have been painted on tiles, including lines from “Autumn Song,” a 1918 poem: “If death is death, what then of poets, and of sleeping things, if no one remembers them?” Lorca had met artist Salvador Dalí in 1923 in Madrid, when they were both living at the Residencia de Estudiantes, Spain’s first cultural center (established in 1910 to complement university education through interdisciplinary and often avant-garde approaches). In the winter of 1988-1989, when Dalí, down to only 34 kg because he refused to eat, his only intelligible statement was "My friend Lorca." In 1927 he painted “The Kiss,” with Lorca’s face underneath and Dalí’s the one with the sad eyes, a motif that Lorca played on shortly before his death. In a letter the following year he told Lorca, “You are a Christian storm and you are in need of some of my paganism … I will go get you and give you some seaside medicine. It will be winter and we will light a fire. The poor beasts will be trembling with the cold. You will recall that you are an inventor of marvelous things and we will live together with a portrait machine….” However, the painter strongly resisted the poet’s homosexual advances, telling Alain Bosquet in 1969 that he “tried to screw me twice… I was extremely annoyed, because I wasn’t homosexual, and I wasn’t interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis-à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dali’s asshole.”
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