Though I failed to get in to the house muesem (see previous post), I was able to visit the Centrol Cultural Federico Garcia Lorca, which is currently showing an exhibit of Lorca’s papers and other artifacts related to the writer’s life in Granada. The Centro is a cool modern structure right in the historic center of the city. It has a theater, gallery, and various community spaces and puts on a variety of programming throughout the year. The current exhibit was two big rooms with cases full of his original drafts of poems and plays in addition to photographs, drawings, etc. I’m not sure why it’s so moving to see actual paper with someone’s actual handwriting on it, but it is, and I think this is especially true for drafts of poems. On these, it was possible to see the edits and changes he was making while writing.
A loose translation:
“I want to go down the well,
I want to climb the walls of Granada,
To watch the past heart
Through the dark press of the waters.”
(I’m not sure how to translate “punzón” in this context, and “corazón pasado” is odd as well, but you get the idea).
One final Lorca image—this street sign, which is quite a name for a street.
Lorca famously wrote and spoke about the concept of duende, which has been enormously influential to 20th and 21st century poetics. I first read about it, and first read his essays and poems, as a sophomore at IU, and I’ve revisited his work ever since. The following year in a modern drama course in London, I read his strange, haunted plays. It was illuminating to see and hear and taste the hyper-local images and tropes in his work—knowing that he pulled his water from a well, heard and saw similar doves, horses, balconies, plazas, orange trees, olive trees, apples. Heartbreaking to think of the work he could have done had he not been executed by Nationalist forces at only 38 years old during the Spanish Civil War. His body and the bodies of thousands of others have never been recovered.
It was a real privilege to contemplate his work in the place he lived much of his life.