In Our Time: S21/42 Lorca (July 4 2019)

this is the BBC hello Federico Garcia Lorca 1898 to 1936 he's one of the great Spanish writers of the 20th century and his death is still a disturbing mystery in his poems and plays he blended his childhood experiences in Andalusia with the modernity and avant-garde of Madrid and Barcelona and his rural trilogy Blood Wedding Yoma and the house of Bernarda Alba have become some of Spain's greatest cultural exports yet he was one of the first writers to be executed by nationalists at the start of the Spanish Civil War perhaps through his writing or politics or a family feud or because he was gay and his body has never been found women to discuss the life and works of Lorca are Federico bond dear reader in modern Spanish at King's College London Sarah Wright professor have Hispanic studies and screen arts at Royal Holloway University of London and Maria Delgado professor of creative arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama University of London Mira God Ilocos born in 1898 what was his family background well his family background was quite mixed I mean his father was a very wealthy landowner and people often forget because he's seen as the poet of the marginalized of the Roma of women of gay men whose fathers actually came from a very wealthy landowning family his mother was a schoolteacher she was an educated woman which was quite rare at the time where not a lot of women had access to education and he often said that he'd inherited his passion from his father and he is intelligence from his mother was what was it about his father gave him passion um he felt very strongly about social issues a lot of the landowners at the time were very reactionary they often exploited their workers he learned about social justice from his father his father didn't avoid his work his father parently did not exploit his work so I think it was a the value system he inherited from his father it was a close-knit family he had three younger siblings a brother Francisco who wrote an important book about vodka and two younger sisters and he grew up not in granada city itself but he was born in the small town of Wendy about girdles which is actually a village 15 miles to the north west of the city and this is where he grew up loving country life he grew up with a love of the rural the imagery of Granada the lush vegetation it was a very fertile area and he the legends the folk ballads so so Granada its landscape was a really important part a very formative influence for him he also grew up loving theater he used to dress up as a priest and enact performances he used to get the house servants to dress up and be part of these performances he was he was a talented musician he learnt the piano quite young and originally had wanted to be a pianist his father wouldn't let him go and study full-time at the Conservatoire but he had a love of music of dressing up of performance um he owned a toy theater which he used to entertain his siblings and the servants with so he grew up in in a culture loving family a good library in the home as well and his mother taught him to read at an early age can you give us some idea of the cultural drift at the time his father seems to be anti what was thought of as the norm of the great landowners of the period so we know about his father or a little about his father what was the general drift of things then he was born in 1898 at a time where Spain was undergoing a great deal of soul-searching 1898 was the year in which Spain lost the last vestiges of her Empire Cuba in the Philippines and he was he was growing up at a time when there was a lot of identity crisis to Spain wondering what kind of a nation it wanted to be the nineteenth century had been a time of unrest they'd been civil unrest a new urban working class that were unhappy at the conditions in which they were held they'd been the Napoleonic invasion three civil conflicts are very weak monarchy and periods of military control so we're talking about a really uneasy political what you did have really at the beginning of the 20th century was the beginnings of a new intellectual movement that ladka identified with the generation of 1898 of which the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno the dramatist vining clan who was an influence on on Lorca the poet and Antonio Machado who wrote a great poem about Lorca's death in 1936 these were influential figures talking about the importance of culture in renovating Spain's sense of self but his parents always looked after him financially so no troubles on that front no in fact his father bankrolled a number of the early editions of his work and it wasn't really until the mid 1930s until his work was staged in Argentina that he became financially independent and could actually send money home to his family so he was in a very fortunate position where his family supported his artistic endeavors Thank You Federico vanna dear how did he start to find his voice okay well his first collection of poems was a collection entitled quite simply libro de apoyo mas which is simply means a book of poems and in some introductory notes to the volume he says that the poetry is a faithful reflection of his adolescence the passion and torture of his adolescence and I think that in this early poetry as a young man he is looking quite simply I think to express himself but the interesting thing about that collection is that it's also engaging with the aesthetic trends of the day with the with with the dominant aesthetic which tends towards impersonal art so on the one hand you have a young man who wants to talk about himself about growing pains and and about his engagement with with the world about his emotions but on the other hand you also have a young man who wants to become a poet and learn his trade as a poet you have any examples I see before me well there's one example in particular from Libra there they are Primus from book of poems in which a number of poems are about the heart so the heart becomes a subject it becomes a object of interrogation rather than some lyrical out whoring so Frances this is from a poem entitled de sail which translates as desire and he writes solo tu corazon Caliente in Adamas my Paraiso on campus in wrists sin reason your knee liras con rio discrete uniform they fear which which translates as only your hot heart nothing more my paradise a field without nightingales or liars with a little fountain and a discreet stream and what we can see from these lines is that the heart becomes the object of of his enquiry here and he talks about this paradise maybe this ideal place which is a field without 90 girls without that nightingale songs he then wrote poem of deep song and gypsy ballets he was fascinated by the Roma way of life which was yet fashionable but it was in his neighborhood and he was fascinated by these people they're done saying that can you say a little about that so again so if we think about poem of the deep song for example he he began writing the poems of that collection at the same time as he was organizing a competition of flamenco deep song with the well-known composer Manuel there a fire which which which took place in 1922 and he's very interested in his local culture he's very interested in the traditions of of Andalusia and and the place where where he was brought up but you can even see even in poem of the deep song the impact of the dominant aesthetic of the day which is a tendency towards impersonal art or even art that has art as its subjects so the subject of poem of deep song is actually in a deep song itself he does depict a performers in it but he actually tries to chart out through his poetry the structures and forms of deep song yeah and he called the checking bottom gypsy Bella's house you have you got a short piece from a gypsy belly before you are you do so this is a couple of extracts from the La Mancha Kitana which translates as the gypsy nun and I'll read this artist Silencio de Cali mirto Melba sin la cierva finis la Mancha boorda al aliy sobre una telepathy thir and a little further on can bordick on que Gracia sobre la telepathy ya quisiera bored our Flores de su fantasy ax which translates as Silence of Myrtle and lime Mallos bloom in meadow grasses the nun embroiders Gilly flowers on a flaxen cloth how finally she embroiders and with such grace she is longing to embroider flowers of her fantasy on the flax and cloth thank you very much it's nice to hear the language great saris alright how would you describe Lucas first plays such as the butterflies evil spell well 1994 saw the publication of the unpublished theater by log of look as youth so we were able to read fragments of plays such as Christ which was about a teenage Christ which was rather surprising for us at the time but we know that the butterflies evil spell was his first production so in a way we kind of think of that as being his early theatre the butterflies evil spell was produced at the sloth theater in Madrid in 1920 and Lorca had read a poem to his friend Gregorio Martinez Sierra which was all about a cockroach who fell in love with the butterfly and Lorca liked to read aloud his work his poetry just as we've heard from Federico there and also his theater and Gregorio really liked this poem and said please make it into a play and we're going to put it on the stage it's a story about insects you sort of imagine them in the field as if they're underneath a magnifying glass and it's about unrequited love unfortunately the play was a complete flop and there were Jia's from the crowd from the audience members they were caused to pour into insecticide on the woodcutter by this time as you as you've alluded he was in Madrid he had gone to sort of university art school in Grenada you know there wasn't any good at Laura didn't want to do law and they're moving into Madrid which is much more one can say and lighten the liberal education across the board so really isms psychology and that's where we're gonna start he met when well and Dali and but his early plays like Don Perlin Flynn still drawing on old Editions we've heard a little of the other traditions can you give us some idea of what he was putting in his place from what he called his older traditions yes don't burn em clean drawers on too early traditions first of all puppet plays he was very interested in from his youth and also a sort of comic strip from the 18th century called the Alleluia which had stock figures so there was Don Perlin clean who was a stock figure a bit like mr. punch and he was the old man who fell in love with young glamorous police' who unfortunately committed adultery on their wedding night so it's a very slight piece it's considered a minor work but it has great complexity because it's all about the difference between carnal desire and a sort of metaphysical love Don Paralympian creates a fantasy figure of the young man in the red cape in order to satisfy police's desires she falls in love with this young man and when Paralympian stabs himself at the end of the play the Lisa is left forever searching for this wonderful young man in the red cape as I understood he got in we thought wasn't become a friend of dally and burn well and he was reading this play aloud to the one when well told him it was that a perhaps can't be repeated on this program that he thought very little of this play and darling later agreed now he's in with the two these two extraordinary people he himself is a extraordinary person what was happening there yes so he was reading aloud his works and I think this was around 1926 when he decided to read don't pray limply into them they absolutely hated it but I think what was going on there was a split really between what they saw as being the folkloric elements that were present in Lorca and what they wanted what they were interested in which was the avant-garde can you take this a bit further to that Morelli this split between the differences I mean I think one of the things that that Sarah's alluded to is the fact that Lord Pell was working on a lot of things at the same time he took in an awful lot of influences he was very influenced by local kind of forms of of art but also surrealism which came to Madrid via Paris and through the residencia this through the anthers a student boarding house which was modeled on an Oxbridge college system with a library that he lived in for about eight years in Madrid and there is where he met when ul and Darlie when well had arrived in 1917 Dali in 1922 they all hung out together Lorca was closer to burn well than he was to - sorry local look was closer to Dali than he was to burn you well and when well was also very close to Dali and eventually that's where the schism between them came upon me now I don't about simple jealousy here we are boys behaving badly I think what was important was the fact that burnwell and Dali didn't really appreciate and understand Lorca's interest in these folk forms of art and dom peddling plainness is part of it but even blood wedding and gypsy ballots are about thinking through Spanish indigenous traditions and they felt when ul and Dali felt that he should be forging forward with dodgy ISM and surrealism and you do see this a number of his early plays often not complete he began work on an awful lot of works where we've only got two fragments a page a page and a half often feature characters with mutilated arms that the language of surrealism is also there in laughers early drawings again showing the influence of Dali on his aesthetic when you would have thought Federica Anna Nadia when he went to New York his enthusiasm for modernism might have been sharpened that doesn't seem to have happened no if you look at the letters he first wrote home to his family he talks about his first sight of New York and seems to speak very positively about these you know wonder skyscrapers before him and and he says they are the the highest achievement of the human soul but I mean even though he had an interesting time and he was well connected to a Columbia University and he had people to look after him and when you look at the at the poems themselves what he conveys through his poetry is the horror of progress the the horrors of modernity and what specifically well I suppose you see a simple opposition between on the one hand the concrete jungle if you like a thought this was Justin he did in his letters that's that's what he communicated but in the poems by a contrast New York comes across as a very oppressive place which is in stark contrast to a nature which he sees as a fitting place for a human beings to a dwelling whereas whereas he sees New York has very oppressive I mean he was dead during the Wall Street Crash as well and so he's his criticism is also directed at capitalism more more broadly and interest in money over the soul if you like over are human beings Sarah um he went to Cuba and as it were disappeared in care but there's not much known about him except possibly by the three of you about what happened I mean cure but when he came back to Spain hey how do you change in ways which are relevant to look and be did he feel he'd learned anything by going to the new world yes I apart from going to jazz bars at New York he also went to see off-broadway plays which really found very enriching when he went to Cuba it was very different from the alienation they'd felt in New York he felt that it was very like Spain he said if I get lost look for me in Cuba or in Andalusia so he felt very much at home there and despite the fact that he was staying with a family there called the loner family he would just disappear because at that time it was a sort of playground for tourists in Cuba and he could go off and we think probably explore sexual liaisons can we just bring you to the surface now he was gay did he ever conceal it was it was it a criminal offense in Cuba and in Spain to be gay or was just a sin oh yes I think that's right I think he's struggling dirty yes it was yes it was possibly different in the Second Republic but certainly under primo de Rivera you know there were very tight controls and yes he struggled I think through his work with his homosexuality as well and I think you know that that's a that's a very important theme to pick up on so he's in Cuba he comes back to Spain he looks at Spain in it what does he think so well he'd been away in Spain there were lots of changes taking place Spain had seen the fall of the dictatorship of primo de Rivera and the establishment of a liberal leftist second Spanish Republic led by Manuel afonya this was a very progressive time for Spain when they thought that what would be interesting would be to have mass literacy programs to deal with illiteracy in the villages and part of this something called the teaching miss missions or Misiones pedagogy cos was a theater troupe called la Baraka which was to be led by Lorca himself so this was an itinerant group of players who would set up a platform in a stage on a lorry they were all dressed in boiler suits and they would take their plays usually Golden Age plays from Spanish tradition out to the villages and to the masses out there and this was subsidized possibly by his father still no in fact it was subsidized by the government and how did that do I mean teaching Malaga did you reach a lot of people although he felt that this was part of social regeneration this is where his true theater lai-lay because he felt that theatre was not for the bourgeoisie it was not for people who were frivolous he went for it for entertainment but it could really reach people in important ways and he saw the Liberec as being a very important part of that was it censored this theatre it wasn't at the time but so it was very much encouraged at the time although the right-wing press were very much against it and it continued right until the ced a the conservative lions swept to power in 1933 and then it was with withdrew funding and then it was disbanded Maria Delgado in the 1930s Lorca wrote three players which the bedrock of his reputation and blood wedding Yoma and the house of Bernarda Alba they mean like a Greek tragedy can you tell us a bit of the key of something about those plays they're all play with women at the center and I think this is one of the other things that marks look out a lot of the dramatists of the time were writing plays about men about the male experience about male power ladka gave a different glance to theatre and I think part of it it's often said that he wrote so many plays for women because he was gay and he empathized with their marginalized position within society remember that women were not given the vote until the second republic in in in the early 1930s so we're talking about a disenfranchised population obviously he was inspired by his mother very erudite his mother taught him to read his mother encouraged education in in in in his himself his brothers and his sisters but also the most important theater figures of the time were women it's specifically a Margate the should go are very important actress she was a Sarah Bernhardt of of Spain and she had a hugely influential theatre company that toured not only in Spain but in Latin America and it was in Latin America specifically Argentina but also Chile and Cuba where the real money from theatre came and he first approached her in nineteen in the mid 1920s with his play Mariana Pineda play about a woman revolutionary a Granada and the trilogy is very much influenced I think by that early play Mariana Pineda a woman a radical woman at its center what he does with the trilogy is write plays about the predicament of desiring women women a sexual agents women who desire men who may not necessarily be the the figures that are arranged for them in marriage we're talking about arranged marriage at the time being very very typical and these are women who fight with agency and against what society has decreed they ought to be so they're often plays as usually the result death is usually result as in Greek tragedy they're often women where they're fighting against in inverted commas fate and their fate is to to marry the people or the figure that the family has chosen for them there's often a rival lover that they're seeing in a clandestine way which is the case in the house of Bernarda Alba with the youngest daughter Adela who's actually you know secretly seeing her elder sister's fiance and you see it also in blood wedding the bride who was betrothed to a bridegroom but actually she's in love with an ex lot an ex-boyfriend Leonardo who's married to a cousin of hers so that tension between love and honor which is so fundamental to the golden age Canon of Cervantes and lo Pido Vega is very much something that he takes with him into his tragedies did you do the honours who's with him in those players um not necessarily I mean not all of them were produced in his lifetime so if you think blood wedding he wasn't happy with the first production of Blood Wedding in 1933 he felt that it was played too much as comedy and that it became about the bride's predicament where he actually saw the mother who's holding up a social order who wants to protect her son as the lead character in Yerma it actually provoked which was produced in 1934 it provoked a riot in the theatre a bit like Playboy of the Western world because it was seen as unthinkable to the right to have a woman who actually kills her husband it was ruling over the charge you want it because he's unable to give her the child not a neighbor he doesn't want it because it prepares money well that's one of the readings that's possible for that for the play one of the other things this year might in Spanish means barren so in fact she would be barren so I think there's ambiguities in the play I think this is one of the things that makes him such a great dramatist that the plays do not have easy readings and I think that that ambiguity he often has allegorical titles for the characters and for the plays the house of Bernarda Alba were obviously taken from the house of Atreus you know the lineal and Lily ology around Greek tragedy being very very evident thank you very much that was terrific fariko how detention is in the plays that being discussed reflect those in Spanish society at the time is he talking directly to society even though they're not getting out to as many audiences as you would wish you know I think that the themes of the play resonate with the polarized politics of the day they stretch back to his early work he has always been interested in a kind of tension between freedom and limits and between expressions and it's an expression so whether it was as I mentioned before you know the tension between him wanting to express himself and then the dominant artistic trends of the day which which which were quite impersonal and and kind of quashed to the lyrical voice or or whether it be pious social structures that that then oppress the individual as in the plays that Maria has just the mention loving desire versus the in positions of a family or a social order on the individual I think I think I think these are the themes that are current throughout his work even in New York again it is about the individual versus this this is the humanized world these themes resonate but but I think they've always been there in one form or another right throughout his work Sarah how did you combine your instincts for folklore with the avant-garde specifically in the rule trilogy yeah perhaps um well if you think of a play like Blood Wedding the blood of the title is very full of andalusia and local references the blood symbolizes passionate desire on the one hand it's also to do with the violence of the long-running feud that's in that play between the two families but it's also to do with bloodline and this idea of Spanish honor and there's something sort of nothing more folkloric than that and but there are other yeah do we really mean Roma I think I am thinking that in in in this context yeah if we think about a character like the moon the moon is very much to do with Lorca's conception of folklore features very prominently in the gypsy ballads for example but in this play is a non naturalistic character it's under dodging as' a bit like Teresa Isis from TS Eliot's the wasteland is an all-seeing figure so the moon is a character who spreads light through the forest and seeks out the lovers so we've got these this sort of duality between the folkloric elements on the one hand and the avant-garde on the other and we even see that with the house of Bernarda Alba which has been for its realism and sobriety because lager said that this should be a photographic document a lot of people have said this is about Moe Metis ISM but in fact we could also see it as being to do with visual distortions so there's a really interesting visual policing in this play with all the young women of the house looking at each other to make sure that they're all behaving well on the one hand there are never any men seen in this play they're only imagined they only you know the harvesters that come in the symbols of hyper-masculine sea or fertility they all take place off stage and then to come back to the female characters we have the grandmother of the house of Bernarda Alba who's my favorite character in that play she's rather pitiful figure who's dressed in a night dress but she thinks it's her wedding dress and she's carrying a lamb as if it's a newborn baby and says that she wants to get married and live by the sea these are all slightly avant-garde distortions that we could read into that play can we just come back here to finish up something that was implicit in what you were saying Federico is this given that Spain was very conservative was his gayness in itself a source of his source for his reaction against that thing he was overheard against the conservatism that's a good question I think what we see in his work is a struggle within himself I think I mean the parados that actually say that Locke himself was quite conservative in his outlook so what was actually in in play here was sort of internal struggles about his own sexuality I'm not absolutely sure about the extent to which his own sexuality actually shaped his reaction broadly to the politics of the day to his society it must have had some influence but as I said I think that he was just very broadly interested in any form I suppose of oppression of the individual and of individual desire so it must had some impact but I don't think it was his only concern we're at the time of these plays he'll be doing other writings around me and tell my three of you that he's writing all sorts of me Oh Sandra what sort of force was here as an intellectual a writer in Spain we know but we know little anyway about Dalian but well what do we know about him he became increasingly a celebrity in his lifetime um he hung up with bullfighters in his you know in in his 30s I mean it was really in in terms of his poems the gypsy balance the Roman federal Heath and all that made his reputation and in terms of theater Blood Wedding and German not the house of Bernarda Alba because he only read that to friends a month and a half before he was killed but already those plays were circulating blood wedding had been published his earlier plays were being restaged so the he one of his puppet plays the shoemaker's wonderful wife received a high-profile production with margarita she'd go so he was being endorsed by the kind of leading cultural figures he had close friends who were poets and novelists one Ramon Jimenez one of the leading novelists at the time took him under his wing he was photographed he was in the newspapers attending the premieres of his plays and attending bullfights so he was seen as a celebrity in his lifetime who they enjoyed I think he loved it I mean he was it was often said of him when well said that he loved being the center of attention his room in the residencia this to the antis in Madrid was you know that was one of the central places in the institution there was also always a party going on he was always the center of attention he loved being the center of attention so he was an extremely exuberant personality matched with that however of course was his depression we know for example that when he was in New York he suffered depression so there was those polar opposites are very present they're present in his writing and they were evidenced in his in his life also promoted from from what you've said in what you written Sara his plays would on the surface at that time lest as time goes on were people get the hang of them be very difficult to perform so are we talking about this series of elegant flops this is what loca thought so he you know well some people might think that his avant-garde works as stepping stones to the to the rule the G which was sort of full-blooded blaze Lorca conceived of his work very differently but he said the the public just isn't ready for the kind of theatre that I would like to do the kind of theatre that he wanted to do was the public from 1930 as soon as five years passed and a fragment that we have called play without a title and the public specifically is about they talk about Romeo and Juliet where Romeo is played by a man of thirty and Juliet is played by a much younger man there's a dialogue between the director and another character about what theatre should be should it be theater of the open air or should it be theater beneath the sand and theatre beneath the sand speaks truth theater immune womanly purse and I think it's all to do with a sort of speaking the truth but also to do with the kind of the ritual arena that goes back to Greek tragedy from beneath the sand it's never really explained but I think I think that's probably as close as I can get to it what is under the ground that we have to really dig down deep to discover and this idea of things not being obvious I mean there's lots of wordplay and game playing in latkes works and and the surreal works that Sarah's alluded to like the public as as five years part of when five years pass and play without a title they're also quite playful funny place I've got moments of great humor it's often forgotten because of the rural trilogy being dominated by tragedy that he was actually a comic dramatist also did one dude Dalian Boone well ever take him as seriously as he wanted to be taken know they ridiculed him then created on Shannon de Loup which he took as an affront he felt that there first a little bit more emotion and before you say why it's an affront and Shannon de Loup was a film that Dali and Boone well-crafted and directed in Paris and buñuel burnwell and Dali never said it was about Lorca but he took it as an insult he felt he was the andalusi and dog who was being ridiculed in the film and he so it's a wasn't till much later dali of course in one of his final interviews talked about the friendship with ladka as being one of the great and most important relationships of his life but i think in there in the early 30's burnwell and dali felt that he was too associated with the rural Spain the backward Spain the Spain of folklore the Spain of the Golden Age tradition to be genuinely haven't got in what way could he be regarded as political at this time Yuriko he didn't make many political pronouncements but I think that the Nero we get to 1936 artists are having to take sides so he was quite reticent but I think he did sign up to political manifestos of the left and there are some interviews where he made some pronouncements that could be understood as sympathetic to to the left-wing cause but then amongst his friends they were you know his friends that that you know there were right-wingers on left wingers apparently he was even a friend of hose it primo de Rivera you know I can imagine Lorca not wanting to be dragged into the politics I think he was somebody that did crave and thrive in the stability but like all others I think that at some point he was made to take sides or at least to pronounce things that made it seem that he was taking one side over the other do you remember that yes I think that's right and but there are other ways that looker was perhaps political and we know that he wrote for example the Ballad of the civil guard which was very critical of the civil guard at the time and perhaps through La Barca which was seen as being a very kind of left-wing force so that there were ways in which he was sort of being positioned on the Left also his his statements about Grenada for example he said that I feel very close to the Roma community I feel very close to its background in Arabic tradition all of these things kind of positioned him in certain ways I think and then almost suddenly he disappeared in 1936 can you give us can you give us what we know about that we know very little on one level we know that on the 23rd of June he read the house of Bernarda Alba two friends in Madrid it had a very good reception he was optimistic that it would soon be staged by Margherita Tiago he left for Granada quite suddenly on the 13th of July and burnwell told us he was tense and frightened he left after a number of assassinations one of a left-wing military lieutenant and the second of a right-wing politician Calvo Sotelo on the 17th of July of course Franco stages coup d'etat his troops rise up and Granada Falls very quickly it's a conservative city Granada so it falls on the 20th of July remember that Locke had talked of Granada as having the worst middle class in the world a meddling middle class and and that didn't endear him to those who taken command in Granada he sawed his brother-in-law who was the mayor of Granada Manuel Montesinos was executed in early August and a few days later he sought refuge in the house of his friend the poet Luis Rosales two of Louis's brothers were members of the Falange which was the fascist party of Spain founded by primo de Rivera who was was also alleged to have been a friend of ladka so he thought he would be safe there but of course the right in Spain that the party that made up the rebel or nationalist forces was made up of different elements of the right so a group from Necedah came and took him away arrested him and took him to the civil government building in the center of Granada two days later he was taken to a village to the north of the city and he was shot somewhere between the village of with nad and a lad with three others schoolteacher and two bullfighters and thrown into a pit I can't even call it great because it wasn't a proper grave a pit and his body lies it is thought somewhere in that ravine in on the outskirts of Granada and it's not been found to this day among 120,000 disappeared at the time what was it thought of it what was a reaction to that at the time Federico you know amongst writers and artists there was complete outrage and delorca became a martyr figure for a Republicans and for the left and it caused international outrage as well I think there's also another aspect when we look back at his work it almost seems as if a loca had foreseen his own death so there's also a narrative around of this kind of foresight that Alaka had he had in his in 1934 he'd written an elegy a lament to a bullfight Ignacio Sanchez Mejias who had died in the bullring and the reflections of death in that poem have almost been seen as not only as in his look as morbid fascination with death but also in a sense some kind of premonition of his own demise how did how did it affect his reputation well during the Franco regime he was barely mentioned I mean Gerald Brennan be the Irish writer talks about going to try and find his grave and nobody wanting to talk about it because he was part of he was identified with a Republican side and of course the whole thing was that they were silenced those people were those those voices were silenced so many wasn't until incomes it was really in Latin America the house of Bernarda Alba was first premiered there in 1945 where he was canonized so in the spanish-speaking world he was canonized through Spanish America and through the beginnings of translations that emerged in the 40s 50s 60s that really cemented his reputation it wasn't until the mid-60s that his plays were really produced in large scale theaters in Spain part of it was his family were too scared to authorize productions and part of it was that there was a kind of lessening of some of the censorship regulations which allowed his work to be staged in Franco's Spain of course had very clear censorship regulations so it wasn't until the 60s that there was a loosening of what was permitted to be staged and a play like Yerma which had inspired riots on its first performance in in 1934 could be staged and I think it's interesting that that that it was I think Franco's why for Franco's daughter actually attended the premiere or an early performance of Yerma in the 1960s in in Madrid so so it was a very tentative reappropriation of Lorca that came in in the 60s Franco also sought to disassociate himself from any culpability for latkas death latkas death was referred to as an accident of war and that's what his death certificate a death certificate which was issue in 1940 said he died of war wounds well that's not true isn't it an act of war yeah but but that's not true he was shot you know he was shot because of his likely his Republican affiliations or perhaps because he was gay or because he defended the right the right or the middle classes in Grenada and his legacy now the three of you started with you hurt Rico his legacy is I mean apart from anything else just the reading his work he just creates wonderful metaphors in his poems and also he described many of his plays as poetry in three dimensions and so you know I think part of his legacy is the verse that he has left us which is wonderful he's the most translated writer from the Spanish language I mean that tells you something about his impact his poems have been set to song by a major artist Leonard Cohen for example the great flamenco fusion artist come on Dale a isla the clash wrote a song about him Nick Cave has talked about the importance of Duende that term that he used to describe the thrill of the live the passion of artistic creation his plays have been adapted to opera to film to ballet he spawned biopics he's referenced in Almodovar films they're statues to him all over the world I'm wondering if there's only Mercer dad I mean I think it's true that Locke is still remembered because of the circumstances of his death and he's a very potent symbol for the search that's ongoing at the moment for the victims of the Spanish Civil War however it's important that we distance look at a little bit from his death when we're interpreting his work so that we can read into it the richness that's important there I think well thank you very much that was a whirlwind thank you thank you very much Sarah right Federico when a dear and Maria Delgado we take our annual break now and we'll be back on the 19th of September with an opponent retreat from Moscow hope you can join us thanks for listening and the inner time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests I think it would be interesting to talk about Duende it's something that's very associated with with Lorca so Duende is on one hand a little sprite figure but is also a feeling that one can presents when watching a flamenco dancer or listening to deep song and we heard from Federico that Lorca was involved in a deep song Festival in 1922 but by 1933 in Buenos Aires he's giving this lecture about the theory and play of Duende so a kind of artistic spirit that's released when he's watching a flamenco dancer or listening to deep song and then somehow becomes communicated to the audience the audience can feel Duende as well it's a very difficult thing to understand I don't know whether my colleagues which can help me out here with this but it's something that's important to an understanding of Lorca so would you like to have a go I call it the thrill of the life I mean cave writes about it there's something about being in the room when an amazing musician is performing or hearing an extraordinary performer in King Lear or you know or blood wedding that something hits you in the stomach something makes you tinge inside that's Duende and it's an emotion it's something very very powerful and and quite difficult to define but it's it's there it's in the gut I think we have to remember that does that look a love reciting his poetry so life performance we not only in time in he also he also acted in he was present in some of his players wasn't he as well so I mean he I loved performance and so Duende is as a way for him also to articulate the thrill of performance for him whether it be the nerves of the passion and what what happens in that unpredictable moment of performance and the relationship with an audience says something about the communion with an audience that's fundamental to Duende that's why I talk about it as a thrill of the live that that live encounter there there's an electricity that you know is there it's so difficult to to define what that is but you can kind of feel it and that's what doing days yeah I think that's right but he also talks about an awareness of death in this lecture which is kind of difficult for us to understand but I think that's taking us back to the difference between the theater of the open air and the theater beneath the sand so awareness of death when we feel most alive and he hopes to kind of capture something of that there's something about the unrepeatable 'ti of performance that he's capturing there in the idea of Duende the ephemerality of it performance is there one instance and then it disappears and I think that's where the death comes it's it's there in the moment then it's gone you can't capture it you can't write it down the play script is just a trace of it but it's a very poor trace of that that moment of liveness I mean that is something about the is it also relates to some of the subject matter of song but also another reference point for him is the bullfight so as a performance you care too that you know it is a matter of you know of life and and death and so that for him is a is a crucial reference point as well I'd like to heard more about it wasn't time of the relationship between Tony and I didn't ask the questions because you're off on a different direction dolly and burn well and him well dolly references wooden your burn well and ladka in a lot of his paintings but especially ladka so there's a number of Dolly's paintings where he fuses his own face with that of ladka so honey is sweeter than water for example a painting from 1927 a still life by by moonlight so there's a lot of referencing of latkes visages his face i and ladka of course paints dolly it's often forgotten that that lot can addition to being a musician and there are recordings of him playing the piano to la gente Nita singing Spanish ballad songs it's not bad the digitally remastered copy is better than some of the earlier ones that the Lord cos scholars drew on in the 60s and 70s he was a decent he was a very decent pianist he could have been a professional pianist but his father didn't want him to become a professional performer but but I think that relationship was fundamental especially to ladka ladka of course fell out with dolly not long after he tried to seduce him apparently not for the first time Donna tried to reduce no latke try to seduce dolly and we know that their correspondence a lot it has been lost so there's at this lost dog burnt we don't know I mean lost in inverted commerce yeah so so you know it doesn't it doesn't exist so a lot of it is subject to conjecture um bogna well of course writes a great deal about vodka in his biography his autobiography my last breath and he talks about what ladka represented he called him his own masterpiece he said I didn't really care that much for his for his work but I felt as a personality he was one of the most extraordinary people I ever met yeah we talked about I'm Shannon de Loup this film script but Luca obviously suffered a bit from this relationship that he had with buñuel and Ali and he may have reciprocated by writing his own film script called trip to the moon which recalls mili as his title obviously trip to the moon but it's very different in in tone it's a sort of metamorphosis with lots of violent imagery lots of male nudes in there and it wasn't actually made into a film until the 1980s by Frederick and Matt so never made into a film during Lorca's own lifetime when when the general knowledge came out about him being gay when was that and was it announcement that changed things in his reputation I mean for many years the family denied he was gay I mean a number of poems came out in the 1980s the sonnets of dark love were published in 1986 and they were it was very clear that they would they were dedicated to an about a male lover but for a long time his most explicitly homosexual work was not published it was not staged the public which is a play that deals with homosexual love gay love wasn't produced until 1986 for the first time so the the the the family or the estate kept a lid on a lot of his more openly gay work until the restoration of democracy in in Spain so that the the you know it was well-known because that lovers had spoken about their relationships with with with LOD court was well-known from his friends but the family did not admit it and it was it was something that was just not talked about in the family but most people are on I mean presumably the artistic family is rather bigger than his own family and they knew about it they did know about it and a number of his friends which they knew that for example the the poet who spent time in in the UK after the Civil War broke out was was one of his gay friends who spoke about it so it was known but it just wasn't talked about and I think it really wasn't until democracy in Spain that it became something that could openly be discussed and and and of course there was poor bindings book about the gay Lorca which sought to read his work through through queer studies and and and and gay iconography so the the gaylord car the queer Lord guide came much much later than the the avant-garde all the surrealist ladka or the folkloric vodka yes and you spoke about the sonnets of dark love being published in the 80s and they were published with a cover that had female nude on the front so is this if the audience was being or the reader was being encouraged to imagine that these were poems directed to a woman rather than to a man which kind of brings us back to what I was saying with the public where you have Romeo being played by a man and Juliet being played by a man as well which of course goes back to the kind of Shakespearean tradition of men playing all the roles but at the same time it's about love between men being hidden but the the thing is is what is a lot of his poetry is not explicit you know say there does make explicit reference and so much if it is metaphorical or symbolic and and so it it's kind of open to at different readings and for one reason or another the queer reading has come as as Maria said you know much later so so that's partly explains I think the tardiness I suppose of the arrival of more explicitly homosexual readings of his work but he's now accepted in toto as though as the person he was in Spain I think there's always something very slippery about ladka ladka lied a great deal in his letter so he was economical with the truth he would send letters to his family saying I'm having a great time I'm really enjoying myself in New York New York is wonderful and yet he told friends that he was suffering a profound sense of anxiety and loss and and and depression so that ladka you know one has to understand that that playful quality of ladka is there in the many latkes that are constructed through his correspondence it makes it very difficult to say Lord Coe was this or latke was that there's an awful lot of slippage there's a lot of um there's something very unsettling about latke something quite unknowable about ladka I think it's there in his writing there's lots of gaps there's lots of absences there's lots of things that can't be fixed down I think it's one of the things that make him such an important writer it's very difficult to say he represents this one thing as further deacon Sara said that those those poems and those plays are subject to a great number of of reading so I think that's one of the reasons he's such a canonical and that classical writers because he continues to signify different things to different generations I think I producers pacing at the door

Channel: In Our Time

Views: 562

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: BBC, Radio, Four

Id: Otgu-DmuaOE

Length: 52min 32sec (3152 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 11 2019