Queerview: Federico Garcia Lorca
Federico Garcia Lorca was a Spanish poet and playwright and member of the avant-garde group of poets and artists known as Generation of ‘27 that also included filmmaker Luis Bunuel and painter Salvador Dali, with whom Lorca was infatuated.
“But above all I sing a common thought
that joins us in the dark and golden hours.
The light that blinds our eyes is not art.
Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.”
-Ode to Salvador Dali
Their frienship grew sour, in part due to Bunuel who worried about Lorca’s “influence” on Dali. Their friendship came to an end when Brunuel and Dali collaborated on the surrealist short film Un Chien Andalou, which Lorca viewed as a personal attack.
Lorca left for New York to travel the U.S. and study at Columbia University. It was during this time that he completed one of his most famous collections of poetry, Poet in New York, which contained the ecstatic Ode to Walt Whitman:
“By the East River and the Bronx
boys were singing, exposing their waists
with the wheel, with oil, leather, and the hammer.
Ninety thousand miners taking silver from the rocks
and children drawing stairs and perspectives.
Not for a moment, Adam of blood, Macho,
man alone at sea, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
because on penthouse roofs,
gathered at bars,
emerging in bunches from the sewers,
trembling between the legs of chauffeurs,
or spinning on dance floors wet with absinthe,
the faggots, Walt Whitman, point you out.
He’s one, too! That’s right! And they land
on your luminous chaste beard,
blonds from the north, blacks from the sands,
crowds of howls and gestures,
like cats or like snakes,
the faggots, Walt Whitman, the faggots,
clouded with tears, flesh for the whip,
the boot, or the teeth of the lion tamers.
He’s one, too! That’s right! Stained fingers
point to the shore of your dream
when a friend eats your apple
with a slight taste of gasoline
and the sun sings in the navels
of boys who play under bridges.
But you didn’t look for scratched eyes,
nor the darkest swamp where someone submerges children,
nor frozen saliva,
nor the curves slit open like a toad’s belly
that the faggots wear in cars and on terraces
while the moon lashes them on the street corners of terror.
You looked for a naked body like a river.
Bull and dream who would join wheel with seaweed,
father of your agony, camellia of your death,
who would groan in the blaze of your hidden equator.”
-Ode to Walt Whitmam
Lorca soon returned to Spain and in 1935, just prior to his death, he published Sonnets of Dark Love privately (only 250 copies were printed). Due to its homosexual undertones, the collection has long been suppressed by Lorca’s family.
“Its honest virtue and its supple throat
twice soiled by slime and scalding foam—
its tremors, frost and misty pearls combined—
bespeak the absence of your mouth. But wait,
just run your hands across its purity
and you will know its snowy melody,
as snowflakes swirl about and cloud your beauty.”
-Gongoran Sonnet in which the Poet Sends a Dove to His Beloved
In 1936, he was arrested and murdered by Franco’s soldiers. No one ever found the body.
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