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Federico Garcia Lorca was born on the 5th of June, 1898 at Fuentevaqueros,
near Granada in Spain.The work of Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain's greatest modern poet, has long been
admire for its emotional intensity and metaphorical brilliance. Few poets take us
more directly and memorably to what Lorca described as "the dark root of the
scream," the terrain of the "duende", where inspiration delivers a new poetic
reality and "intelligence" discovers it limitations.The Generation of 1927
In the 1920s, the regenerating winds of aesthetic avant-guardism blew across Europe with vigour. Outstanding Spanish personalities such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel figures largely in the movement. The work of the former was intimately tied to his Spanish roots and an excessive and baroque temperament, full of contrasts which seemed to characterize Spanish art. It was Picasso, who, with the Cubist style, wrote the first page of 20th century painting. Admirers of this painter from Malaga can appreciate his Guernica, the portrait depicting the horror of the Nazi bombing of this Basque town during the Civil War, in the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.
In Barcelona, art-lovers can visit Avino Street, the symbolic cradle of Cubism embodied in Las Senoritas de Avignon. There is also the splendid Picasso Museum in the centre of the Gothic quarter, which houses a number of works of his youth, as well as many engravings and the series of paintings inspired by Las Meninas of Velazquez.
Madrid was the birthplace of the Cubist, Juan Gris, who succeeded in reducing the objects he painted to their chromatic mass and elemental geometric properties. And Catalunya can claim parentage of Juan Miro,the master of surrealism, who was profoundly poetic and original, with his infantile style betraying wise vision. A large part of his work is exhibited in the Miro Foundation in Barcelona, which is houses in a superb building designed by the architec Josep Luis Sert.
Also associated with surrealism is Salvador Dali, an exceptional artist, who liked to provoke bourgeois sensibility with shocking and calculate gestures. Dali had lived with Luis Bunuel and Federico Garcia Lorca in the 1920s at the Student Residence (Residencia de Estudiantes) in Madrid. This institution enormously important for its intellectual ambiance and great artistic fertility of its lodgers, persists today as a thriving cultural centre and the site of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. It was there that the group of poets known as the Generation of '27 was born.
For the first time since the beginning of the 17th century, a group of preeminent lyric talents coincided in Spain: Jorge Guillen, Pedro Salinas, Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, the Nobel Prize winner Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda, Damaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego,... Culturally speaking, the Generation of '27 represented a unique moment in which the prevailing impressions were of the carefree attitude of the avantguard, the illusion of modernist art and the optimism of the old Continent between the wars. In Spain, this ambiance flourished ephemerally in the heady atmosphere created by the proclamation of the Second Republic. Young artists were entranced with the world of cinema, the 'lights of the city', the rupture with the bourgeoisie, the art of realism and the illusion of a political and aesthetic revolution.
Several years later, all of them suffered the tremendous lacerations of the Civil War. Federico Garcia Lorca was assassinated by the Nationalists and his dramatic death symbolized that of an entire creative Generation. Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillen, Rosa Chacel and Maria Zambrano were forced to go into exile. Their poetry, which had brought to Spanish lyricism the ideal of perfection in 'pure poetry', became more temporal, more reflective. (From: Si España)
¿donde irán,
del naranjal?
Ni a Córdoba ni a Sevilla
llegarán.
por el mar.
los llevarán,
donde tiembla el cantar.
con siete ayes clavados,
¿donde iran
los cien jinetes andaluces
hace llorar a los sueños.
El sollozo de las almas
se escapa por su boca
Y como la tarántula
teje una gran estrella
que flotan en su negro
con su polison de nardos.
El niño la esta mirando.
mueve la luna sus brazos
sus senos de duro estaño.
-Huye luna, luna, luna.
Si vinieran los gitanos,
harian con tu corazón
-Niño, déjame que baile.
Cuando vengan los gitanos,
te encontrarán sobre el yunque
con los ojillos cerrados.
que ya siento los caballos.
mi blancor almidonado
tocando el tambor del llano.
tiene los ojos cerrados.
bronce y sueño, los gitanos.
y los ojos entornados.
ay, como canta en el arbol!
con un niño de la mano.
dando gritos, los gitanos.
En lo alto de aquel monte
Pastor que vas,
Olivares soñolientos
Pastor que vas,
Ni ovejas blancas ni perro
Pastor que vas,
en el trigal te disuelves.
II
amarilla.
Orillo, orillo,
pastorcillo.
Ni luna blanca
ni estrella lucían.
pastorcillo.
corta el llanto de la viña.
pastorcillo
en el campo de oro.
de campanas antiguas
y ojos de pájaro.
de niebla, y sin embargo
horalda la naranja
del aire, en el verano.
no tienen amo
y recuerdan las alas
de sus costados.
siempre van suspirando
por los campos de Ruth
en busca del vado,
del eterno vado,
borrachos de luceros
a rumiarse sus llantos.
en el campo de oro.
de las margaritas ando.
que soy santo.
en las manos.
en los espacios
y el Señor me premió
con la rosa y el halo.
de las margaritas ando.
por este campo
a librar a las niñas
de galanes malos
y dar monedas de oro
a todos los muchachos.
de las margaritas ando.
Federico Garcia Lorca
Claudia Verano DaMetz
