Federico García Lorca, the Granada poet whose rural tragedies still fill theatres ninety years on

Federico García Lorca

Photo: Maitane Azurmendi / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 5, 1898 Fuente Vaqueros
Died	August 19, 1936 (38)
Occupation	Theatre Director

Every August, people walk up the road between Víznar and Alfacar, in the hills above Granada, carrying flowers for a man nobody has managed to bury. Federico García Lorca was shot there, or somewhere very close, in the first weeks of the Spanish Civil War, and his body has never been found. This summer marked ninety years since his death, and the poet who wrote about death more lucidly than almost anyone in the language is still, in the most literal sense, missing.

What he left behind is easier to find. His ballads are learned by heart in classrooms from Seville to Buenos Aires, and his three rural tragedies, Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, keep coming back to stages on several continents. Lorca welded the oldest forms of Andalusian song to the European avant-garde, and he did it so naturally that his lines sound like folk verse and modern poetry at once.

He was born on 5 June 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, a farming village in the vega west of Granada, the son of a prosperous landowner and a schoolteacher. Music came first. He studied piano for six years and turned seriously to writing only after his teacher, Antonio Segura Mesa, died in 1916. In Madrid he lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes, where his friends included Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, and back home in 1922 he helped the composer Manuel de Falla stage the Concurso de Cante Jondo, a festival meant to rescue flamenco’s deep song from neglect.

That obsession produced Poema del cante jondo, written in those years and published only in 1931. The book that made him famous was Romancero gitano (1928), a sequence of ballads full of Gitanos, Civil Guards, moons and knives, cast in the old Spanish ballad metre but lit by metaphors nobody had dared before. It travelled across the Spanish-speaking world and turned him into a public figure, and it typecast him as a folklorist, a label he came to resent. With the Generation of ’27, the poets who opened Spanish verse to surrealism and the avant-garde, he became its most recognisable face.

Success came with a private crisis: a broken affair with the sculptor Emilio Aladrén and a widening distance from Dalí. In 1929 his family sent him to New York, where he enrolled at Columbia University and saw the Wall Street crash at close range. The poems he wrote there, gathered as Poeta en Nueva York and published in 1940, four years after his death, are his darkest and most experimental, a fractured vision of the modern city from Harlem to the stock exchange. The same months produced The Public, a play about love between men and about theatre itself, so far ahead of its time that it was not staged until 1978.

Back in Spain in 1930, he found a new republic and a new vocation. From 1931 he directed La Barraca, a state-funded student company that carried classics of the Spanish Golden Age by truck to villages that had never seen a play, with Lorca directing and sometimes acting. His own theatre ran alongside: Mariana Pineda, with sets by Dalí, had opened in Barcelona in 1927, the farce The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife reached the stage in 1930, and he wrote When Five Years Pass in 1931. Then came the tragedies. Blood Wedding opened in Madrid in March 1933, the story of a bride who rides off with her former lover on her wedding day while the Moon and a beggar woman who is Death walk the stage. Yerma, premiered in December 1934 with the actress Margarita Xirgu, follows a woman consumed by her longing for a child, and Doña Rosita the Spinster came in 1935.

A long stay in Buenos Aires in 1933, where Blood Wedding became a hit, gave him the stage for his most quoted lecture, Juego y teoría del duende. Duende, he argued, is a dark power rooted in the soil, and no great art exists without a vivid awareness of death. His last poems lived up to it: Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935), an elegy for a bullfighter friend; Seis poemas galegos (1935), written in Galician; Diván del Tamarit, published in 1940; and the Sonetos del amor oscuro, love poems shared only with friends and not published until 1983.

In the summer of 1936 he finished The House of Bernarda Alba, in which a widow imposes eight years of mourning on her five daughters behind closed shutters. Weeks later the military uprising broke out. Lorca was in Granada, at the family’s summer house, the Huerta de San Vicente, and took refuge with the poet Luis Rosales, whose brothers were Falangists. He was arrested in mid-August and shot by Nationalist militia, probably on 18 or 19 August 1936, alongside a schoolteacher and two bullfighters’ assistants. Franco’s regime kept his work banned until 1953. The House of Bernarda Alba had its premiere in exile, in Buenos Aires on 8 March 1945, with Xirgu in the company.

The search for his remains has become a story of its own. Excavations in 2009, 2014 and 2016 found nothing. This year the Irish Hispanist Ian Gibson, who has spent more than half a century on the case, published No me encontraron (Aguilar), built around the diary he kept during the first official dig and what followed over fifteen years. He still believes the poet lies beneath the fountain of the park at Alfacar.

Meanwhile the work keeps travelling. Leonard Cohen named his daughter after him and turned Pequeño vals vienés, from Poeta en Nueva York, into Take This Waltz in 1986. Carlos Saura made Blood Wedding into a flamenco film in 1981, and Simon Stone’s version of Yerma at London’s Young Vic in 2016 won Billie Piper the Olivier Award for best actress. In 1936 Lorca gave his own definition: theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair.

Tags: Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, playwrights, poets, The House of Bernarda Alba, Blood Wedding

Federico García Lorca, the Granada poet whose rural tragedies still fill theatres ninety years on

More Like This

Salman Rushdie, the novelist who answered a death sentence with more stories

Yuval Noah Harari, the medieval war historian who turned the human story into a global bestseller

Jack London, the oyster pirate who wrote the wild into American fiction

Sylvia Plath

Nick Harkaway, the gonzo science fiction novelist now keeping his father’s George Smiley alive

Miles Franklin, the debut that outlasted everything she wrote

Discussion