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NARRATIVE STRUCTURE
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POETA EN NUEVA YORK

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RONALD FRANCIS RAPIN

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NARRATIVE STRUCTURE IN
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA'S

POETA EN NUEXA YORK

 

By

Ronald F. Rapin

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Romance and Classical
Languages and Literatures

1986

Copyright by
RONALD FRANCIS RAPIN
1986

ii

ABSTRACT

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE IN
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA’S
POETAggN NUEVA YORK
By

Ronald Francis Rapin

For many years. scholarly interest in Federico Garcia
Lorca’s Eoeta en Nuegg_:ork produced numerous studies of
themes. images, and textual tradition. This dissertation
undertakes an analysis of the narrative structure of the
work, and demonstrates that this collection of poems. so
often labeled surrealist. chaotic, and even incomprehensi—
ble by many critics in the past, is in fact a carefully
constructed composition. influenced by surrealism, but not
surrealist.

In the ”Introduction” a study is made of Lorca’s
epoch, which includes the various artistic movements of
the early twentieth century as well as the socio/political
tenor of the times.

Chapter One analyzes the polemic which came about
when serious questions concerning the ”correct” text and
format of the work were raised in the last decade by Lorca

scholars. The principal arguments are reviewed, and a

Ronald Francis Rapin

rationale is given for selecting the 1940 Norton edition
of the work.

Chapter Two elaborates the principal themes in the
work: love, death, and oppression.

The narrative structure of Poets en Nuevg,York is
analyzed in Chapter Three. It is demonstrated that no
poem in the composition can be appreciated aesthetically or
fully comprehended when it is isolated and read out of con-
text from the poems which precede and follow it in the work.

A study of narrative structure in Poeta en Nueva York
reveals aspects of the work overlooked until now. Through
careful ordering of the poems, and innovative use of
narrative voice, which are the foci of this study. Lorca
created a poetic chronicle, enigmatic and incoherent at
times, but purposefully so. He successfully portrayed
fundamental aspects of modern American urban reality by
instilling into the text the same elements of confusion

and chaos that are commonly associated with it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to the faculty of the
Department of Romance and Classical Languages and
Literatures at Michigan State University. I owe a great
deal of my preparation and training to Professors Robert
Fiore, Juan Calvo, Lucia Lockert, Helene Tzitsikas, and
Dennis Seniff, and to Professor Kenneth Scholberg, who did
me the special favor of proof—reading this dissertation.

I would especially like to thank Professor Malcolm A.
Compitello. my thesis director, and Professor George P.
Mansour, the Chairman of the Department of Romance and
Classical Languages and Literatures, for all of their
support, special assistance. and encouragement which they
offered to me during my six years of graduate studies at
Michigan State University.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER ONE

The Textual Tradition of

Poets en Nueva_York . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
CHAPTER Two 0 O O O O O O O O O O O 0 O O O O O O O 79
CHAPTER THREE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .115
CONCLUSION O O O O O I O O O O O O O O O O O O O o 194

BIBLIOGRAPHY...................199

iv

INTRODUCTION

In the forty five years which have passed since the
publication of Federico Garcia Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York
(BN1). much critical study has been undertaken by Lorca
scholars interested in explicating this enigmatic poetry.
The work has generated numerous studies of themes, imagery,
and textual composition, but very little interest has been
shown in 231's narrative structure. A fundamental
structural unity pervades this work, and any attempt to
assess, comprehend, or appreciate Garcia Lorca’s
accomplishment is incomplete without a consideration of this
important element of poetic composition.

This study undertakes a thorough analysis of Poeta en
Nueva York by analyzing the relationship between its
thematic content and its narrative structure, a task
complicated by an on-going polemic regarding the work’s
”canonical” disposition.

Poetaggn Nueva_York is a complex work which
incorporates diverse thematic and structural elements.
Psychological. sociological. spiritual, and political
concerns can all be discerned in the poems. But each poem
in the composition, while an entity in and of itself, may be
more fully understood if it is related to all of the others

in the work. Certainly, each poem may be isolated and

appreciated separately, but the poet’s true genius becomes
apparent only when one considers what extraordinary measures
he took to assure that the work would follow a formal
narrative structure.

An overview of Lorca’s life and times is a necessary
first step toward an analysis of BN1. The political and
social circumstances of that period are discussed in
conjunction with Lorca’s own biography, and also with the
dynamic modes of artistic expression which were generated
and flourished during his life time.

A consideration of the polemic regarding 351's
composition and disposition follows, and highlights the
reasons behind the selection of the 1940 Norton edition as
the one used for this study.

The major thematic concerns in the work are then
investigated. This is a crucial "middle step" which must be
taken prior to a comprehensive analysis of the structure of
the work. As already mentioned, the structural pattern of
the work was deliberately formed. Lorca did not submit a
group of poems simply "thrown together” haphazardly to be
published. Rather, he paid scrupulous attention to thematic
content, narrative structure, and the interrelatedness of
each poem to all of the others. The value of an analysis of
this correlation lies in how it allows for a re-examination
of the work by elucidating the narrative structure of the

poems, a task having never been undertaken before. For many

years after the first appearance of the work—~particularly

in the first two decades after its publication—~Lorca
scholars tended to either ignore PNY, or to treat its theme
and content in highly unsystematic fashions. Many found it

easier to label the work a "surrealist enigma,’ and to
simply shrug it off as the ramblings of a poet undergoing a
severe psychological and artistic crisis. Angel del Rio, a
close friend of the poet, described the work in this way:
[Poet§_en Nueva York]. . . is the outcome of a
triple crisis: an emotional crisis in the life of
the post, to which he constantly alluded in those
days without completely revealing its nature; a
crisis coincident with, and, in part, as result
of, the crisis through which all modern poetry
was going with the advent of surrealism and other
"isms," and finally, a crisie--a profound one—~in
the American scene that the poet was going to
encounter (1).
While it is indeed true that the work was the result of a
personal crisis, Del Rio's mistake, echoed in the work of
others, was to analyze PNY almost exclusively in these
terms, and to ignore other important elements.

In recent times, critics have been more thorough in
approaching the text as a whole, but for the most part, have
focused on Lorca's biography in relation to the text, or on
the ideology which affords it unity. Valuable studies
discussed below treat these thematic concerns, and while
many have been most scrupulous in their analyses of each
poem, few have attempted to take the important final step
and relate the substantive thematic context of the poetry to

a coherent structural narrative which is innate to PNY.

To undertake such an enterprise, references are made to

1.,
several instructive studies dealing largely with thematic
concerns which have been published over the years. There
have been Marxist, Freudian, and Jungian analyses made of
Lorca's New York poetry, and these all make pertinent
contributions to an understanding of the work. Insights
drawn from semiotics and reader response criticism and other
modern methods are employed because they offer tools vital
to an analysis of narrative structure.

Poeta en Nuevg York is at times complex and obtuse.
Through the use of narrative structure as a basis, the work
can be more thoroughly analyzed with regards to its use of
metaphor, symbolism, and narrative voice.

The complex New York poetry was a product of its times.
So was its writer. Federico Garcia Lorca lived in an epoch
of radical socio-political and artistic change that was both
global and regional in scope. Spain experienced in
microcosm the currents that were sweeping the world at that
time, and the poet's own busy life reflects the complexity
of his epoch. Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada,
Andalusia in 1898, a decisive and highly significant year in
Spanish history due to the loss of all her overseas colonies
during that year. He was executed in 1936, during the first
chaotic weeks of the Spanish Civil War (2). The social,
political, and artistic movements which transpired during
the years of Lorca's life time often created both a regional
and a global atmosphere of flux. Currents and counter-

currents in the artistic world were rampant, and reflected

in varying degrees both the incredible advances and novelty
of the era, as well as the catastrophes and upheavals of the
times. An examination of the early twentieth century aids

in an analysis of Poet§_en Nuev§_York, a work mediated by

 

the dynamics of this tumultuous era.

Garcia Lorca’s biography should be considered in
relation to this period as well, since numerous events in
the life of the poet were later coded in one way or another
into the work. It is currently a disputed issue as to what
extent the biography of an author should be considered when
analyzing his/her textual creation. If parameters are set
which keep a textual analysis from degenerating into simple
biography, then certain biographical elements may be used as
an enhancement to the interpretation of a text. Lorca's New

York poems are overwhelmingly centered on "yo, as evidenced
by both the first and last poems of the work, "Vuelta de
paseo," and "Son de los negros en Cuba," as well as several
within the composition ("1910 Intermedio," "Tu enfancia en
Menton,” and ”Poema doble del lago Edem," to name Just a
few), and for this reason, it would be inappropriate to
minimize this personal element. 0n the other hand, a
textual analysis will often require a careful screening of
biographical information, since it should always be the text
which is the main focus of literary research. In a study
entitled, ”Psychology and Literature," Carl Gustav Jung

offers some helpful advice which can be used to establish

the appropriate parameters of biographic study:

Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis
of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he
is a human being with a personal life, while on
the other side he is an impersonal, creative
process. Since as a human being he may be sound
or morbid, we must look at his psychic make~up to
find the determinants of his personality. But we
can only understand him in his capacity of artist
by looking at his creative achievement. We
should make a sad mistake if we tried to explain
the mode of life of an English gentleman, a
Prussian officer, or a cardinal in terms of
personal factors (3).

Jung's observations offer a helpful guide when attempting to
integrate elements of Lorca’s biography into an analysis of
Poet§_en Nueva_York. An attempt must be made to understand
Lorca as an artist, but only inasmuch as this understanding
may be applied to textual concerns as well.

The scientific advancements and social upheavals of the
early twentieth century did not develop in a vacuum, but
rather, evolved out of the theories, discoveries, and the
historical dialectic of previous centuries. Certainly, the
nineteenth century was highly influential. Challenges to
long-held doctrines and beliefs effected by Marx and Darwin
and the repercussions of these challenges only intensified
by the turn of the century. Reuben Osborn summarizes some
of the changes in world view which occurred in the
nineteenth century:

The dialectical view of reality received its main
impetus in the nineteenth century, when the view
that the world was a product of a long process of
evolution was making its way. The old Greek logic
which dealt with rigid, unchanging things was felt
to be inadequate to deal with the changing rhythm
of the universe. Aristotle had formulated three

laws which gave a framework for reasoning about
all things, and which had remained almost

completely unchallenged to the beginning of the
nineteenth century (4).

This change in the world view had repercussions in all
fields of human endeavor, political, social, and artistic.
Several scholars have noted a "speeding up" of life
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A complexity
of events, scientific discoveries, and technological
advances had a tendency to fragment the social, political,
and artistic fabric, and Just as new advances were
incorporated into the lives of the people of the epoch,
several older, more stringent beliefs were discarded
proportionally. C. Day Lewis describes the relationship
between evolving patterns of twentieth century history and
the poetry of the period:
It is surely not fanciful to suggest that the
profusion of novel imagery we find in the
Metaphysicals, in the Post—symbolists, and the
poets of our own time, has its source in certain
historical conditions; for, if the image is a
method of disclosing a pattern beneath phenomena,
it seems reasonable to argue that, when a social
pattern is changing, when the beliefs or structure
of a society are in process of disintegration, the
poets should instinctively go farther and more
boldly afield in a search for images which may
reveal new patterns, some reintegration at work
beneath the surface, or may merely compensate them
for the incoherence of the outside world by a more
insistent emphasis on order in the world of their
imagination (S).
This concept of the incoherence of the modern world expressed
in modern imagery has been noted as one of the main
characteristics in Poets en Nueva York. In fact, early

scholars linked the incoherence of the verses with what they

supposed were Lorca's "incoherent" perceptions of the

8
overwhelming American metropolis. Often, because there are
baffling Juxtapositions of imagery and metaphors, many simply

called it ”surrealist,’ and dismissed it as somehow
incomprehensible. The preponderance of nouns and verbs in
the imagery of the New York poetry is perhaps what most
confused the early critics. It certainly fits Day's
observations concerning the use of multiple imagery by the
modern poets, because the New York poems are replete with
novel and shocking imagery. We note the preponderance of
multiple imagery in the following verses from the book:
Cuando el chino lloraba en el tejado
sin encontrar e1 desnudo de su mujer,
y el director del banco observaba el manbmetro
que mide el cruel silencio de la moneda,
e1 mascarén llegaba a Wall Street.
No es extraﬁo para la danza
este columbario que pone los ojos amarillos.
De la esfinge a la caja de caudales hay un hilo tenso
que atraviesa e1 corazon de todos los niﬁos pobres.
El impetu primitivo baila con el impetu mecénico.
Ignorantes en su frenesi de la luz original.
Porque si la rueda olvida su formula
ya puede cantar desnuda con las manadas de caballos
y si una llama quema los helados proyetos
en cielo tendra que huir ante e1 tumulto de 1as ventanas
(6)
In these verses, Lorca Juxtaposes several dysfunctional
elements which he perceives in the city, with other,
positive elements that he associates with Nature. The
impotent Chinese man, and then the banker who keeps vigil
over his money, are contrasted with the horse, here an image

representative of Nature and wholesomeness. As can be

clearly observed in this passage from "Danza de la muerte,"

Lorca often borrowed from the surrealists their chaotic
imagery, and it was this which confused many of the early
critics of the work. However, modern critics perceived the
inherent structural and thematic unity of the work, and thus
were able to discern certain outstanding themes, such as the
destruction of nature, and the dehumanization of the
technolocical society as epitomized by New York City. These
themes can be discerned easily in the passage above. The
nineteenth century Symbolists, themselves participants in
the rapidly fragmenting order of their day were the ones who
were the precursors of what was to develop into the multiple
styles of modern poetry: surrealism, creationism, ultraism,
etc. But what links the poets of both centuries is the
tendency to ignore-—and even to disdain--rigid poetic
stylistics, and to concentrate instead on producing poetry
which almost barrages the reader with a series of either
related or unrelated metaphor, symbol, and imagery. There
can be little wonder that this practice of breaking with the
rigid rhyme and metric structures came at a time when the
old political and social world order was breaking down as
well. Lorca’s poetry stands, therefore, as a kind of
paradigm of the innovations, and of the artistic movements
which brought the changes.

It has only been relatively recently that the critics
have stopped labeling the New York poetry "surrealist." Not
surprisingly, when scholars began to delve beyond labels,

they began to realize that PNY is not simply a textual

10

torrent of swirling and chaotic imagery, but rather, a
systematic and thematically coherent composition. The
element of surrealism which does seem to have had great
influence on Lorca was its insistence on liberty, in both
the artistic and political realms. Just how much the
leftist tendencies of most of the surrealist artists
affected Lorca is open to debate, but after reading the New
York poetry with care, it can be plainly seen that the
influence was considerable. This political aspect in Garcia
Lorca's work is often left uninvestigated, even though it
deserves attention, especially when analyzing his later
works, such as PNY.

Before examining Lorca’s own political tendencies, a
short discussion of surrealism is instructive. German
Gullon makes a valuable connection between the world events
of the time, and the evolution of surrealism. Any scrutiny
of Poets en Nueva;York must recognize the influences of both
upon the poet:

La primera Guerra mundial y la Revolucion rusa de
1917 supusieron sendos golpes de gracia a la
falta de confianza que la intelectualidad tenia
en el orden de valores herederos del positivismo
del siglo anterior: severas transformaciones
sociales evidenciaban la necesidad de cambio que
produjeron unas alarmantes fluctuaciones
politicas bien documentadas en la historia de la
época. En 1909 el italiano Felippo Marinetti
lanza e1 Mgnifesto de Futurismo, con 10 cual se
inaugura oficialmente la época de 1as
vanguardias. El futurismo venia a sumarse a1
expresionismo, a1 cubismo, precediendo a1
dadaismo y al surrealismo, por nombrar solo a
cuatro de los movimientos signifitivos. Los

ismos se sucederan en gran profusion y
representan una respuesta apropiada a1 fracaso

11

del Estado moderno en asumir sus
responsabilidades en términos contemporaneos.
Ademés, sus creaciones revelan una total
desconfianza y abandono de los caminos de la
rezon; 1as conculsiones de le devastadora y cruel
guerra europea hizo que los artistes perdieran
toda fe en el poder dei raciocinio, tenido en
especial apreciacion en los siglos precedentes
(7).
Those involved with the "vanguardies" to which Gullon
refers were members of an artistic group labeled the
"avant—garde." The label itself is significant, because it
implies a "movement forward" in the arts. The challenges
to the restrictive artistic dogmas of earlier decades gave
way during this movement to several innovative sub-
movements such as futurism, dadaism, and surreleism in both
the plastic arts and in poetry, all of which, as Gullon
indicates, were generated as responses to social and
political events that could not be reconciled with the
positivist thinking of the previous century. Darwin’s
theories, which implied the perfectibility of the human
species, seemed little more than false promises to many who
had witnessed the violence of the Russian and Mexican
revolutions and the First World War.

Perhaps the earliest, and one of the most dynamic of
the avant-garde movements was futurism (8). Felippo
Marinetti, an Italian poet most noted for his exhortetion
to "burn all the museums” and any other buildings which
represented a "stale” and anachronistic pest, became the

spokesman for the futurists in 1909. He urged artists to

ignore the ”crusty” and irrelevant arts of previous

12

centuries, and to look rather to the future and toward the
onward thrust of scientific and technological change for
their inspiration. Futurism was exhilarating. It was
youth—oriented and extremely anti—establishment. Marinetti
and several of his followers were political anarchists. In
their poetry and their paintings, they attempted to depict
the dynamic movements of machinery and to capture the force
of new forms of energy which were being introduced in
Europe at that time such as electricity. Anita Rozlapa
captures the intimate linkage between art and technology
which existed in the artistic philosophy of the futurists
and other members of the evant-garde movements. She notes
that during the first two decades of the twentieth century,
artists became increasingly interested in the incorporation
of industrial and technological motifs into their artistic
works, and that it was the Futurists, who glorified
technological advancements and modern modes, who were at
the forefront of this trend (9).

Whereas futurism focused upon the accomplishments of
scientific discovery, dadaism, the movement which followed
on its heels, rejected its logical integration of
technology into artistic expression, but adopted, and
augmented, the anarchistic elements of futurism. Dadaism
was an attempt to bring about an utter collapse of logical
relationships. and rational thought patterns. The dadaists
took their inspirations from what they perceived was the

collage-like interpretations of reality by infants and the

13

mentally infirm. Jose Maria Capote Benot describes this
movement:
En cuanto al dadaismo, el movimiento precursor
del surrealismo, fue une tendencia literaria de
escese duracién formulade por Tristan Tzare,
cuyo Manifiesto dadaists fue publicado en 1918.
Se treteba en dicho movimiento a imiter el
lenguaje infantil, llevando a cabo composiciones
cerentes de toda recionelidad légice y
literaria, tal que si hubiesen escritas por mano
de un niﬁo, presentando esi poemes sin siquiera
una disposicion formal o versiculer tradicionel,
y llegendo, por consiguiente, a una absolute
distorcién, tanto literaria como celigrafica, e
incluso arquitectonice o distributive (10).
It is impossible, or at least ill—advised, to ignore
the year in which the Dedeist Manifesto was published.
Much of the world was reeling at that time from the effects
of the devastating first world war. Furthermore, the
violence which characterized both the Mexican revolution,
and the Russian revolution and subsequent Civil War were
inescapable reminders to the people of the period of the
irrational component of humenkind's character. The shocks
which these occurences produced on twentieth century
thought and perceptions of the world generated dadaism
first, which sought to rebel against any western
rationelity-—after all, what had it produced but
destruction and war? But this utter abandonment of logic
and system in the arts was short lived, and during the
twenties, the world soon began to stabilize from the
effects of the world war. André Breton published the first
Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. The surrealist credo

incorporated several elements of the earlier futurist and

14
dadaist movements, but the most important element
incorporated was an emphasis—~an absolute demand in fact,
on artistic freedom and liberation from any form af
artistic constraints. Perhaps the biggest difference
between surrealism and the other two artistic movements was
its marked leftist tendency. Whereas the futurists had been
largely anarchists, who consciously rejected any form of
political creed (and who, indirectly hastened the rise of
European fascism by causing a backlash to their views).
the dadaists had not even interested themselves in these
political matters. But the surrealists extended their
artistic cell for liberty to include a similar political
call as well. They rejected what they perceived to be the
stifling and oppressive capitalist system, and embraced a
leftist ideology, to which André Breton gave voice in his
two surrealist manifestos which were both highly laudatory
of the communist system. It might be helpful to remember
in this regard that the surrealists, who demanded autonomy
and liberty of expression, were inclined to shun dependence
on patrons and "bourgeois" tastes, and to look with envy on
the Russian artists who were considered laborors like any
others, and were guaranteed an income like any other
worker. Breton, who maintained his position as the
official spokesman of the Surrealists for well over a
decade, exhibits in both his First and Second Surrealist
Manifestos the leftest tendencies which led him and many

other surrealist artists to support Communism. In the

15

First Surrealist Manifesto, published in 1924, Breton
focuses largely on the Surrealist Movement itself, and on
the debt which it owed to Sigmund Freud. For example, he

writes:

It was, apparently, by pure chance, that part of
our mental world which we pretended not to be
concerned with any longer——and, in my opinion by
far the most important pert——has been brought
back to light. For this we must give thanks to
the discoveries of Sigmund Freud (11).

But in the Second Surrealist Manifesto, a strong shift
toward Communist orientation is seen. In this work
published in 1929, five years after the first one, Freud is
de-emphasized, and Trotsky and Engels are cited instead:

Our allegiance to the principal of historical
materialism. . . there is no way to play on these
words. 50 long as that depends solely on us~-I
mean provided that communism does not look upon
us merely as so many strange animals intended to
be exhibited strolling about and gaping
suspiciously in its ranks—we shall prove
ourselves fully capable of doing our duty as
revolutionaries (12).

Henri Peyre relates the surrealist political protest
to both the first world war, and to the perceived
corruption of the capitalist system:

In the field of politics, the fierceness of the
Surrealist protest is best understood if one
remembers that it originated during the First
World War. And in many ways the First World War
shook the minds of men more powerfully than the
Second. For it broke out after a long are of
peace and material progress, during which
Europeans had become accustomed to celebrate
civilization and science as undeniably
benificent. Suddenly, they were faced with the
glaring bankruptcy of science, of logic, of
their faith in progress, of philosophy and
literature which failed to protest against the
great massacre and often undertook to justify it

16

(13).
Just as Peyre has done above, many critics have
concentrated on the political aspects of the surrealist
movement. But to maximize this facet to the exclusion of
its other dimensions is to do an injustice for two basic
reasons. First, and most obviously, surrealism was an
artistic movement, and as such, it should be analyzed first
and foremost on the aesthetic qualities of the works of art
themselves. This does not diminish the importance of the
political themes of many of the works, but rather, places
them in a proper perspective. Another reason for wariness
when attempting to link surrealism to the left is that not
all of the artists were of leftist ideological persuasions.
It is sufficient to cite the example of Salvador Dali to
prove this point; an undisputed surrealist artist, Dali
shunned politics almost completely, and on those rare
occasions when he did not, gave reason to believe that he
had fascist leanings (14). Vicente Aleixandre's surrealist
works, like those of Deli, deal very seldom with political
themes.

There are other facets to be assessed when
investigating the essence of the surrealist movement.
Psychological elements, existentialist philosophy and
alienation all played roles in the development of the
surrealist art forms. In surrealist poetry, numerous
stylistic innovations were undertaken as well.

Experimentation with meter, rhyme patterns, and mutations

17

of traditional style and imagery were popular and
encouraged. There are, in fact, so many diverse elements
involved with attempting to delimit or define the movement
that many opt for a minimal, or skeletal definition,. For
example, the noted scholar Ricardo Gullon, in his article
entitled, "gHubo un surrealismo espaﬁol?" despairing of
the vast number of characteristics that some include in a
definition of the term, chooses to define it in its
simplest form: " . . . fusion de lo reel y lo fantéstico
en una realidad otra (15).” If the desire is to simplify
the definition, then Gullon has certainly succeded. His is
a workable definition, but perhaps somewhat too broad.
This definition tends to complicate matters because it does
not delimit the parameters of the movement.
Yves Duplessis offers another useful perspective on
Surrealism when he writes:
Surrealism may be considered a form of that impulse
which, throughout the ages and in all countries,
has infected those of the elite who have wanted to
emancipate themselves from their limits. It
opposes classical Western philosophy as well as
every negative and hopeless concept of existence.
It allies itself with the great advances of
thought, which escape all historical classification
since they aim at nothing less than to resolve the
agonizing problem of our destiny (16).
The idea of the universality of surrealism is instructive,
yet it should be noted that this definition too has a
tendency to be rather broad in scope, as other artistic

movements throughout history have also addressed the

question of human emancipation.

18

Any attempt to determine a definition or description

of surrealism based on its artistic creation must include

an elaboration of common traits. José Maria Capote Benot,

in his ”Introduccién" to Luis Cernude's Antologie offers a

useful list, which includes: an affinity for the exotic,

an interest in Freudian theories related to the

subconscious and the dream state, a spirit of adventure,

irrational and disparate associations, and an exhaltation

of love and eroticism (17). Yet even this concise

summation of the characteristics of surrealism lacks one

important factor, the idea of a mutation or

evolving

character of the movement. The dynamic aspect of event-

garde art, including surrealism, is central

to Renato

Poggioli's fundamental work, The Theory of thngvgnt_§grde

(18). In it, he describes four distinct tendencies found

in the movement: activism, antagonism, nihilism, and

agonism. According to Poggioli, these four

components form

a dialectical process, which encompasses both a genesis and

an "apocalypse" of the movement. The first
"activism" is the "sparking to life" of the
in turn engenders an enthusiastic taste for

adventure on the part of interested artists

phase, or
movement, which
action and

and supporters.

This is the ”birth” of the movement. The second stage, or

"antagonism,'

comes about as the artists attempt to defend

themselves and their fledgling movement against those

forces in the society determined to stamp it out in the

interest of maintaining tradition. The artists may go on

19

the defensive at this point, and openly fight what they
perceive to be the status quo of the artistic world which
refuses to make way for their evolving artistic forms. The
third attitude, the ”nihilistic," is actually an
amplification of the second. Nihilism is a destructive
stance which attempts to break down with absolute disregard
any form of barrier or resistance opposing it. Finally,
the thriving forces of the movement turn away from outside
destruction to inner~directed inhiletion, and the movement
destroys itself, a victim on the ”sacrificial altar" of
creative evolution. Poggioli explains this destructive
element of the theory in the following manner:
Still in the ideologies of more recent event—
gardes, the agonistic sacrifice is conceived in
terms of a collective group of men born and
growing up at the same moment in history: in
other words, as Gertrude Stein called a
generation that ironically survived itself and a
world war, a lost generation. But it is
important to repeat that this destiny is often
accepted not only as a historic fatalism but as a
psychological one as well. So the agonistic
tendency itself seems to represent the
masochistic impulse in the avant—garde psychosis,
just as the nihilistic seems to be the sadistic
(19).
An application of Poggioli's discoveries assists in
determining an accurate description, and at least a partial
definition of the multi—faceted movement. In addition to
scrutinizing various themes and literary devices,
surrealism must be viewed in the context of a dialectic

process. A close correlation may be discerned for example

between the energetic appearance of the French surrealists,

20

and their subsequent rapid turn toward the political left--
the activistic and antagonistic attitudes to which Poggioli
refers were forces which acted on the artists of that time.
Soon after the founding of the movement in the late 1920's,
artists such as Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamps, Luis
Cernuda, and Rafael Alberti were in open rebellion against
the restrictions of their respective societies, and
conveyed their contempt not only in the artistic arena, but
in the political arena as well. Their artistic

works "lash out" at their societies, through their
manipulation of the "shock value" produced by those works.
Their political statements are of an equally radical tenor.
And whereas these artists remained politically active all
of their lives, their art forms eventually lost their
elements of surprise, since the world eventually became
accustomed to surrealism. Once that "threatening" element
was gone, then surrealism lost the vibrancy which had held
the world captivated for more than a decade. Surrealism
finally reached Poggioli's final stage—~he would say that
surrealism brought about its own demise by sacrificing its
fundamental attribute——the very ability to shock~—the
quality which had given it its initial strength.

If components from the definitions reviewed above are
combined, a workable definition of the movement can be
advanced. Surrealism was a dynamic artistic movement which
encompassed the years 1924 to 1945, more or less. The

artists involved assigned great emphasis to dreams, the

21

subconscious, personal and artistic liberty, and shock
value. This last facet, having been integrated into
popular artistic taste, lost its ability to surprise, and
thus, hastened the demise of the movement itself.

There is, of course, disagreement among Lorca scholars
as to the extent of Surrealism's influence on the Spanish
poet, as well as on other poets of his generation. Some
have staunchly maintained the Poets en Nuevngork is e
surrealistic work, and others have denied this assertion
with comparable vehemence (20). In view of the
multiplicity of definitions which exist concerning
surrealism, this polemic comes as little surprise. A
possible way out of the deadlock is to ignore the question
as to whether the work is surrealist as such, and to
determine, to the extent possible, in just what ways the
surrealist movement influenced the poet, and which aspects
of the movement he chose to incorporate into his poetic
creation. The semantics of the abstract debates are thus
avoided, and the texts of Lorca's work can serve as a basis
for analysis.

The situation of Poetggen Nueva York within the
corpus of Lorca's other writings is an instructive first
step toward measuring the effects of Surrealism on Lorca.
His first widely successful work Libro de poemes was
published in 1921 (21), and thus, was not influenced at all
by the surrealist movement engendered roughly three years

later, and given strength with the publication of Breton's

22

first manifesto. Manuel Duran characterizes Garcia Lorca’s
first poems as "post-romantic" and much influenced by Juan
Ramon Jimenez: "Garcia Lorca comienza su carrera poétice
como post-roméntico, semi—modernista, sensible y
melancolico discipulo de Juan Ramon Jimenez" (22). A
second book of poems, Canciones (23), was then published in
1927. What is still not noticeable in any of these poems is
surrealist imagery, but rather, a strong romanticism.
Betty Jean Craige describes certain of these romantic
tendencies in the first two works: ”. . . Libro degpoemas
and Canciones contain what may be described as a mystical
desire for the unattainable, for peace, for the stars. . .
(24)."

In 1928, Lorca published what was to be one of his
most acclaimed works. It was in his Romancero gitano (25)
that he began to incorporate some of the oniric and
psychical elements which so fascinated the surrealists,
including violent impulse, murder, and incest. Paul Ilie,
in his study entitled Surrealism and Spain, discusses the
surrealist aspects of the work in detail (26). Lorca’s
strong concerns for social inequality and oppression is
seen in this work as well, which links it on a political
plane with other surrealist works written at that time.

In addition to his poetic works, Lorca was
simultaneously working on his dramatic productions.
Mariana Pineda was completed in 1925, and produced on stage

in 1927 (27). A condensed version of La zapatera

23

prodigioéé (28) was produced in Madrid immediately after

 

his return from New York and Havana in 1930.

The years 1929-1930 seem to be pivotal in Garcia
Lorca's life and in his artistic creation. He began to
take a much more active interest in the techniques of
photomontage, the cinema, and other innovative sources
which caught the attention of the surrealists of the
period. Juxtapositions of time, space, and reality appear
in Poete en NuegggYork, just as they do in some of his
screen plays such as Viaje a la lune which were written
during his sojourn in the American metropolis (29). Soon
thereafter, he began to write some of his most widely
acclaimed dramatic works: El amor de Don Perlimpin con

Belisg en su jardin (1931) (30), El retgblillo de Don

 

 

Cristobal (1931) (31), A§i gue pesen cinco aﬁos (1931)

 

 

(32), Elgpﬁblico (1933) (33), Bodas de sgngre (1935) (34),
131mg (1934) (35), and La casa de Berngrda_Albg (1936)
(36). Manuel Duran has noted the important tie between
Poete en Nuevg_York and the dramas which Lorca subsequently
wrote: "Poete en Nuegg;§ork seﬁala una crisis, una
experiencia de solitario durante la cual Lorca hallara la
clave de su carrera literaria y la f6rmula de su teatro
(37).” This is an astute observation, for there does seem
to be a definitive shift on Lorca's part away from poetry,
starting from 1930 onwards, to drama-with one notable
exception, ngnto por Ignacio Sépchez Mejias, (38) which

Lorca published in 1935 in honor of his friend slain in the

24

bull ring. Whereas in his earlier works, such as Libro de
poemes, Canciones, and Romancero gitgﬂg no noticeable
narrative structure is discernible, in Poet§;en Nuev§_York,
the poems begin to be interrelated on temporal and
geographic planes, and form a much more evolutionary
composition, much closer to the media of cinema and drama
than to that of verse. To cite just one example, in Libro
de poemes, the rather melancholy and highly personal poem
"Veleta," well—known for its strophe,

sin ningﬁn viento, zhazme ceso!

gira, corazén:

gira, corazén (39).
is directly followed in the book by a rather whimsical and
totally unrelated poem "Los encuentros de un carecol
aventurero” (40). In Romancero gitano there is slightly
more inter-relatedness in the poems due to the common gypsy
motifs, and there is quite possibly an inherent narrative
structure in this work as well, albeit not as pronounced as
in 3N1, but yet, each romance tends to form an entity in
itself, and may be read independently of the others. The
interrelatedness of the poems in this work is of a
secondary nature only. But in Poetg_en Nueva York, the
sequence is wholly discernible, from the first poem in the
work in which Lorca cries out against his solitude and the
overwhelming city (”Vuelta de paseo") to the following two,
which are (almost cinematographic) flashbacks to his early
childhood. This important element forms the basis for

other portions of this study, but it is important to point

25

out here this change in his stylistics. It should also be
noted that this juncture in his creation came about just as
Lorca began experimenting with surrealist imagery and
technique. It is a facet of his work which must be
scrupulously examined if an analysis of structural
narration in the work is to be successful. C. B. Morris,
while not referring specifically to the New York poetry,
offers a helpful insight into Lorca's adaptation of
currents in vogue during the period:
Lorca was drawn to the attempts made by the
surrealist artists and filmakers to shape a new
reality on a plane where--through a change of
angle, focus, and intention-—familiar, concrete
objects are placed in new contexts, familiar
actions become sinister, and sinister actions
become familiar (41).
Morris offers an important key to a serious reading of this
work. Lorca was indeed drawn to the attempts of the
surrealists to "place familiar, concrete objects into new
contexts." Unfortunately, for many years, Lorca scholars
failed to perceive the deeper significance of Lorca's work.
Many were quick to label his work "surrealist," based
exclusively on the imagery which Lorca included in the
text. Images such as "wind blurring the mirrors (El rey de
Harlem),” "a storage cell powered with the smother of wasps
(”E1 rey de Harlem"),” and "those who drink down the tears
of the dead girls in the bank—lobby (”Danza de la muerte)."
to name but a few, were cast in the light of Lautréamont's

famous ”fortuitous clash of distinct and unrelated

objects," and subsequently dismissed by the critics as

26

unfathomable images. Virginia Higginbothem, however,
offers a much more enlightened commentary concerning this
aspect of the poems:
Quiza la contribucién mas famosa de Maldoror a1
surrealismo sea la famosa metAfora en el canto
sexto en que Lautréamont compare la belleza
humane con el encuentro fortuito de una méquina
de coser con un paraguas sobre una mesa
quirﬁrgica, la metafore que dio a los
surrealistas uno de sus ejemplos mes estimados de
‘1e hasard.’ E1 efecto que produce esta
metafora--la sorprese y el choque~es e1 resultado
que busceron los surrealistas y que Lorca buscé
también para expresar e1 estado de conmocion
psicolégica que sufrié en Nueva York. La
referencia a insectos y animales en poemes que
describen la vida mecanica de la ciudad aumenta
la impresion del encuentro accidental y violento
entre el mundo natural y el mundo tecnolégico
(42).
Higginbotham demonstrates that Lorca was not simply
deriving a new set of imagery and metaphor in New York by
pulling elements "out of the air," but rather, he was
describing what he saw. This is an important point,
because many Lorca scholars believe that the poetry
reflects ”par excellence” the fortuitous encounters of
things, or unrelated materiel objects which so interested
the surrealists. But as Higginbotham indicates, Lorca was
not inventing these encounters simply to create the
surrealist goal of shock. Just the opposite is true. What
seems even to have shocked the poet in the American
metropolis is that these "fortuitous encounters” were to be
seen around every corner. In other words, most of the

imagery that Lorca presents in the work is not surrealist.

It is very real. Butterflies drowned in ink—wells, cats

27

flattened to sheet metal, tape worms preserved under glass,
and several other poetic images that appear in the work
certainly have all at one time or another been seen in one
form or another in New York City. They are indeed
fortuitous encounters of unrelated objects, but they are
not surreal. A walk down the streets of that city would
produce visions of these images, and more. Thus, these
were not the automatic creations of a mind in crisis, but
rather, the scenes which Garcia Lorca encountered in the
city. Joseph Zdenek offers the best clarification of these
considerations:

If we examine the historical framework in which
Poete en Nuevg York was written and consider some
of Garcia Lorca's poems and his ideas about
poetic theory, it seems that Poete en Nueva York
is not a product of his gubcongciougnegg, but of
his ggpercongciousness and that it is not truly
surrealistic, but rather, superrealistic. The
extra doses of realism, the bombardment of real
experiences on the creative mind of Lorca led to
a supersensitivity to the world surrounding him,
with no contact with the subconscious or the
inner world of dreams. In other words, his
thought was not uncontrolled by reason, nor, in
my opinion, did the figurative elements in this
collection come from a "reperatorio de imégenes
del delirio 0 del ensueho y sus enlaces fortuitos
o incoherentes,: a definition of suprarreelismo
or surrealism found in the Real Academia (43).

 

 

Zdenek's observations are fundamental, for they correct
some common misconceptions held by earlier Lorca scholars.
Even close friends of the post, such as Roy Campbell,
mistook Poetg en Nueva York as a surrealist work, as can be

seen in the following commentary:

28

Lorca went and stayed in the United States for
some time, but was unable to establish a real
contact with the Americans or their way of life.
He under—went, while there, the intellectual
influence, if not domination, of Salvador Dali,
his friend. Lorca at-tempted to follow the
Catalonian into the complex world of surrealism.

(44).

Over the years, more detailed studies have been made
of the year in which Lorca lived in New York, and its
influence upon his artistic creation. In his New York
pnoetry, Lorca was, in fact, much separated from the
enatomatic, and sometimes capricious writings of the
Eiiropean surrealists. He used several of their innovations
iri the arts in order to present a more coherent world view
(:vhich captured then, in turn, the incoherence of the
nubdern metropolis); he chose not to retreat into a personal
PS3Nchical realm of automatism and inner exploration, but
Patdner, to present what he perceived to be the "surreal"
Worild of technological, industrial, and economic
OPPt‘ession. It was in the face of this world that he
struggled to give modern life a kind of coherence. He
coLﬁlcd do this as a post first by naming the things which
assﬁiulted his sensibility in New York, and then denouncing
than“. Betty Jean Craige has researched this aspect of the
"9" York poetry in detail (45). Sequentially, the forms in
the’ book follow this type of order. In poems such as
'WHJGIta de paseo," "Aurora," and "Navidad en el Hudson,"
draWing his imagery from the chaotic city in 1929—1930, he

deseribes the desperate plight of the humans trapped in the

29

modern nightmare of metropolitein life. Later in the
composition, once having decried the lack of fundamental
character in the lives of the city dwellers, he then
distances himself far enough away from the city and the
effects which it has on him in order to denounce the entire
situation ("New York: Oficina y denuncio," ”Grito hacia
Roma"). In these two poems, and others, he denounces the
oppression of existing governmental and religious
institutions, and his political leanings thus become clear
through the poems. The politics of the work should be
examined in order to comprehend the New York poetry more
completely.

Garcia Lorca very rarely characterized himself as a
political being, and, in spite of his own assertion, made
earlier in the Libro de poemgg that ". . .yo soy nihiliste
(46),” and in spite of numerous similar claims he made
subsequently, Lorca was by no means an apolitical figure.
His sympathies tended always to rest on the side of the
poor and the oppressed of the world, which often placed him
much in harmony with the leftest European surrealists. His
well—known sympathy for the gypsies, for exploited
children, for the Blacks of Harlem, for the plight of women
and homosexuals placed him solidly in the camp of the anti~
traditionalists. José Ortega comments on the political
content of Post; en Nueva York in this way:

Este poemerio no puede reducirse, como parte de

la critica he pretendido, a una crisis personal.
Una lecture atenta nos descubrira que la

30

ideologia de Poete en Nueva York esta fundada en
la angustia del hombre que se rebela contra las
premises de una razon y orden que
sistematicamente hen venido instrumentando la
subersion y destruccion de los valores humenos, 0
sea de la libertad (47).

 

Juan Cano Ballesta corroborates Ortege's observations,
while singling out the capitalist system in particular as
the principal "villain" in the New York poetry:

El poeta entiende su época mejor que muchos de sus
contemporéneos y adquiere plena consciencia de lo
que ocurre a su alrededor. Rechazando toda
complacencia beeta en une realidad que se le
vuelve cada dia mes extraﬁa e impenetrable,
presiente la amenanza de un futuro inquietante y
trata de expreserla en un lenguaje poético de gran
originalidad. Mas que impresionado por el
espectacular avance tecnologico de Nueva York, se
muestra preocupado por su capacidad destructora.
La atmosfera de armonia paradisiaca entre hombre y
naturaleza se ha disipado. La expansion
industrial destruye y contemina el paisaje,
mientras e1 sistema de explotacion capitalists
divide a los hombres en opresores y oprimidos
(48).

In later years, after his return from the New World,
Lorca often identified with the poltitcal left in his own
country (49). This must be a consideration in the analysis
of Poets en Nueg§_York. This chapter has examined several
influences, political, social, and artistic, which in some
way affected Lorca. His writings exhude political
statement. As he became more forceful in expressing these
views in his works, the works themselves became more and
more innovative, and thus, the liberties which Lorca called
for in his works are reflected in the liberty with which he
experimented in his dramas and poetry. Some of his works,

like PNY, are in themselves "revolutionary" in their vision

31

and composition. Instilling a narrative structure into the
New York poetry was highly innovative, since it was an
experiment with new forms of discourse and poetic

expression.

NOTES

1. Angel del Rio, "Introduction," in Federico
Garcia Lorca, Poet§_en Nueva York (New York: Grove Press,
Inc., 1955), p. xiii.

2. Ian Gibson, in his carefully researched and
documented The Assassingtion of Faggrico Ggrciggiorcg
attributes Lorca's execution to Ramon Ruiz Alonso and
other members of the ultra—conservative "Accion Popular"
political group, and to the governor of Granada, José
Valdés Guzman. Gibson writes: "But this is not to say
that Ramon Ruiz Alonso and his fellow members of Accion
Popular were alone responsible for the death of the post,
as the Falange would have us believe. The fact that Lorca
was taken to the Civil Government instead of being
immediately shot in the street or by some roadside on the
outskirts of the town—-the usual fate of the victims of
the 'Black Squed', for example,——shows that in arresting
him Ruiz Alonso was acting with the official blessing of
no less an authority than the Falangist Civil Governor
himself, and it is undeniable that responsibility for what
was to happen to Lorca passed out of Ruiz Alonso's hands
once he had left him in Duquesa Street. Henceforth,
Federico was at the mercy of Valdés. And Valdés--with the

probable connivance of Queipo de L1ano—-chose to have him

32

33

shot. Whoever first decided that Lorca should be
arrested, and the evidence points to Ruiz Alonso and
Accion Popular, the death itself was carried out
officially, on the orders of Valdés." Ian Gibson, Ihg
Assassination of ngerico_§grci§_Lorc§ (New York: Penguin
Books, Inc., 1983), pp. 181—2.

3. Carl Gustave Jung, Modern Mgn In Segrch of a Soul
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1933), pp.
168-169.

4. Reuben Osborn, Freud and Mggx: A Diglecticgl
Sgggx (New York: Equinox Co—operative Press, Inc., 1977),
pp. 237-238.

5. C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image (London: Jonathan

 

Cape, 1947). PP. 50—1.

6. Federico Garcia Lorca, The Post in New York_§gg
Other Poems of Fedgrico,§§rci§‘Lorc§, Rolfe Humphries,
trans. (New York: W. W. Norton Co., Inc., 1940), p. 48.

7. German Gullon, "Garcia Lorca y la Segunda
Republics Espeﬁola," ﬁgrcig_Lo£gg;Review, X, No. 1
(Spring, 1982): 11—12. It should also be taken into
account that in addition to the global turbulence of the
times, Garcia Lorca grew up in a rapidly changing national
turmoil as well. In his lifetime, his nation passed from
a colonial power (due to the loss of the Spanish—American
War which ended the year he was born) to a beleaguered
monarchy plagued with internal strife and weakness under

Alfonso XIII, to a dictatorship under Primo de Rivera

34

(1923-1930), to a Republic beset with internal divisions
and bickering political and religious factions. The chaos
and violence of Garcia Lorca's times thus mirrored
paradigmatically the world situation of the epoch.

8. Among the most thorough works dealing with
Futurism are: Robert Hughs, The Shock of the New (New
York: Knopf, 1981), and H. H. Arnason, A Higtory of
Modern Art, Second Edition (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
Prentice—Hall, Inc., 1978).

9. "Les barreras entre arte y vida asimismo tienden a
disolverse en la aproximacion que presenciamos entre el
arte y la ciencia en el siglo XX. Desde principios del
siglo e1 arte, que ha tenido siempre relacién con avences
tecnologios, se ha evolucionedo en estrecha dependencia, y
hasta en cierta competencia, con la ciencia y la
tecnologia. Los nuevos medios tecnologicos (de
reproduccion, transports, comunicacién y cibernética),
multiplicandose esombrosamente, hen cambiedo nuestre
percepcién del mundo y hasta los propositos del arte
mismo.

Los movimientos vanguardistas de las primeres decades
del siglo apoyan la integracién de materieles, formas y
temas contemporaneos en la obra de arte, una integrecién
que se mantiene vigente en las sucesivas etapas del arte
contemporéneo. Objetos hechos por mAquina se asimilan en
la obra de arts 0 se convierten ellos mismos en la obra de

arte. E1 nuevo enfoque cientifico desmitifica la

35

realidad, devistiéndola de su entigua aura sublime para
desnudarla en su pura presencia material. Rate se hace
patents, por lo menos, desde el futurismo que glorifica el
mundo, que la tecnologia he transformado por la nueva
belleza de la velocidad." Anita Rozlapa, "El arts

deshumanizado, 1925~1975," Americgn Hispanist, (Sept.,

 

1976), 15.

10. José Maria Capote Benot, "Introduccion," in Luis
Cernuda, Antologia (Madrid: Cétedra, S. A., 1981), p. 14.

11. André Breton, "Excerpts from the First
Surrealist Manifesto (1924)," in Surrealists on Art, Lucy
R. Lippard, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice—Hall,
Inc., 1970), p. 12.

12. André Breton, "Excerpts from the Second
Surrealist Manifesto (1929),” in Surrealists on Art, Lucy
R. Lippard, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: PrenticeeHall,
Inc., 1970), p. 32.

13. Henri Peyre, "The Significance of Surrealism,"
lgle Frgnch Studieg, (Fall—Winter, 1948): 40.

14. Dali's politics were the subject of a bitter
attack by André Breton in 1949: "To find oneself in
disgrace before her [liberty] there is no need to go as
far as Chirico did fifteen years ago, underlining the
wretchedness of one of his canvasses of the time with a
fascist title like "Roman Legionnaires Looking Over

Conquered Country,’ or to go so far as, more recently,

Avida Dollars [Breton’s anagram for Salvador Dali],

36

gilding with obsequious academism the portrait of the
Spanish ambassador, that is to say, of the representative
of Franco, the monster to whom the author of the portrait
precisely owes the oppression of his country, not to
mention the death of the best friend of his youth, the
great poet Garcia Lorca-~Frenco: one knows only too well
the regards Franco has for life, for mind,, and for
liberty." Andre Breton, "The Situation of Surrealism

Between the Two Wars,” Yale French Studies, 67—68 (Fall—

 

Winter, 1948), p. 74

15. Ricardo Gu116n, "LHubo un surrealismo espaﬁol?"
in Peter G. Earle y Germén Gullén, eds.
Surrealismo/Surrealismos, Latinogméricggy Espeﬁa
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1975). PP.
118—119.

16. Yves Duplessis, Surrealism, Paul Capon, trans.
(Westport, CN: Greenwood Press Pub's., 1978), p. 447.
Paul Ilie offers another significant perspective
concerning a description of surrealism: :. . . cada grupo
nacional refleja su peculiarided colectiva, la cual
denominamos 1a forms nacional o modo del movimiento
surrealists. Y este modo no se diferencia del trasfondo o
ambiente literario en nivel colectivo, pero segﬁn
mecanismos evolutivos parecidos a1 nivel individual de los
escritores. Ceda diferenciacion nacional muestra rasgos
propios pero a1 modo surrealists participa en el

movimiento total, descubriendo caracteristices compartidas

37

con otros modos nacionales (Paul Ilie, "El surrealismo
espeﬁol como modalidad,“ in Peter G. Earle, and Germén

Gullén, eds. Surrelismq/Surrealismos, Lgtinogmérica y

 

Espeﬁa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1975),
p. 111.

17. "El gusto por lo exotico y lo maravilloso, la
integracién de las entonces recientes teorias freudianas
al quehacer artistico, la profundizacion en el
subconsciente a través de lo onirico, el espiritu de
investigecién y de aventura en las parceles mas oscuras
del ser humano y de su entorno, la tendencia haste lo
misterioso, la asociacion irrecional de los aspectos mas
dispares de une realidad cualquiera, e1 interés por la
enumeracién disparatada, la exhaltacion del amor y del

eroticismo, etc., son, entre otros muchos, los aspectos

fundamentales de este movimiento, vivo todavia hoy en
muchas tendencies de la literature y el arts.” José
Maria Capote Benot, "Introduccion," in Cernuda, Antologia,

p. 15.

 

18. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Angt-Garde,
Gerald Fitzgerald, trans. Second Ed. (Cambridge, Mass.:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968). See
especially pp. 25 to 76.

19. Poggioli, Avant-Garde, p. 68. 20. Some of the

most important critical works which
examine the Spanish Surrealist movement, and the

Surrealists in general are: Vittorio Boddini, Los poetas

 

38

surrealistas espaﬁolas (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1971); José
Luis Cano, Poesia espaﬁole del siglo XX de Unamuno a Bles
de Otero (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1960): José Luis Cano, Lg
poesia de la generggién del 27 (Madrid: Guadarrama,
1973): Jose Francisco Cirré, Fogme x egpiritu de una
lirica espaﬁolgj notici§_§obre lagrenovgcion poéticg_en
Espaﬁe dg 1920_g;1935 (Mexico: Grafica Panamericane,
1950): Paul Ilie, Los surrealistas egpgﬁpleg (Madrid:

Taurus Ediciones, S. A., 1972): C. B. Morris, Surreglism

 

and Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

21. Federico Garcia Lorca, Libro de pgemgg (Madrid:
Meroto, 1921).

22. Manuel Duran, "Garcia Lorca, Poete entre dos
mundos,” in Gil Idelfonso—Manuel, ed., Fedgrico Garcia
Lorcg: E1 escritor y l§_9riticg (Madrid: Taurus
Ediciones, S. A., 1975), p. 194.

23. Federico Garcia Lorca, Canciones (Melage:
Litorel, 1927).

24. Betty Jean Craige, Lorca’s Poete en Nuevg_York:

 

The Egll Into Congciousness (Lexington, KY: The
University Press of Kentucky, 1977), p. 6.

25. Federico Garcia Lorca, Romgncero gitano (Madrid:
Revista del Occidente, 1928).

26. Paul Ilie, The Surrealist Mode in Spanish
Litggéture (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
1968).

27. Federico Garcia Lorca, Mariana Pineda (Madrid:

39

La Farse, Aﬁo II, Nﬁm. 52, 1928).

 

28. ~ , La zapatera prodigiosg in Obras
completes, Ed. Guillermo de Torre (Buenos Aires: Losada,
1938). First performance, 1930.

29. —————————— , A Trip to the Moon, Berenice G.

 

Duncan, Trans. (New York: New Directions, 1964).
30. —————————— , El amor de Don Perlimplin con Belisa

en su jardin, in Obrgg completes, Guillermo de Torre, Ed.

 

(Buenos Aires: Losada, 1938). First performance, 1933.
31. —————————— , El retablillo de Don Cristobgl in
Obrgs completgg, Guillermo de Torre, Ed. (Buenos Aires:

Losada, 1938).

 

32. , Asi guegpgsen cinco aﬁog in Hora de

 

Espaﬁa, (Valencia, Num. 11, 1937).

 

33. , Elgpublico, in Obrgg completes,

Guillermo de Torre, Ed. (Buenops Aires: Losada, 1938).

 

34. , Bodgs de_gangre (Madrid: Cruz y

Raye, 1935). First performance, 1933.

 

35. , Yerma (Buenos Aires, Anaconda,

1937). First performance, 1934.

 

36. , La casa dg,Bgrn§:d§;Alb§, in nggg
completes (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1946). This work has
been the one which the critics have taken as a starting
point in analyzing Garcia Lorca's final works. But recent
discoveries have been made which indicate that Garcia
Lorca's theatrical trajectory can not be so easily

analyzed. It appears that he was, during the final year

40

before his death, working on several different dramas, some
of which have surfaced only recently. Miguel Garcia Posade
has researched this important aspect of Lorca's works, and
he writes, "Los detos de que se dispone sobre la actividad
de Lorca en este ultimo aﬁo de su vida, impiden, por otra
parte, alcanzar conclusiones simplificadoras. Tras La casa
dengrngrdg;Alb§, Lorca trabaja todavia en el primer acto
de Los sueﬁog de mi pgimggAurglig, evocacion de la infancie
grenadine del poete, donde e1 verso desempeﬁa de nuevo un
papel importente. Sabemos que el poeta trabaja tembién en
L§_de§truccion de Sodomg, tragedia como Bodas o Yerma, de

la que perece haber concluido un acto. La Comedia_sin

 

titulo cepta tembién su atencién en este tramo final de su

vida. No es posible, por tanto, ver en La casa de Bernggdg

 

Alba el punto de partida de la future evolucion dremétice
de Lorca, a1 margen de su innegable perfeccién. Bernarda

Alba era una de las posibilidades del teatro lorquiano en

 

1936. El autor exploreba en multiples direcciones:
tragedia, drama, misterio... Y si esta obra fue el ﬁnico
de los proyectos pendientes que llegé a feliz término, no
cabs sino imputarlo a un hado dichoso, que seguremente
encontro terreno abonado en la especial incidencia que
tienen les preocupaciones sociales sobre el dramaturgo en
este momento." Miguel Garcia Poseda, "Introduccién", in
Federico Garcia Lorca, La casa de Bg;nggdg_Albg (Madrid:
Editorial Castalia, 1983), pp. 33-4.

37. Duran, "Dos mundos," p. 194.

41

38. Federico Garcia Lorca, El llanto por Ignacio Sépcheg

 

 

Mejias (Madrid: Ediciones del Arbol, Cruz y Raye, 1935).
39. Federico Garcia Lorca, "Veleta," in Libro de
poemes, Poemg del ante Jondo, Romgnceroggitgno, Poet§_en Nuevg
YorkLgBodgg de saggre, Yermg (Mexico: Editorial Porrﬁa,
S. A., 1977), p. 9.
40. Federico Garcia Lorca, "Los encuentros de un

90

carecol aventurero, in Libro de poemgg, . . , pp. 9-11.

41. C. B. Morris, Surrealism and Spain: 1920-1936
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 50.
Cyril Morris has also published a scrupulous study on the
influence of surrealist and avant-garde cinema on the
Spanish surrealists of the generation of 27: Cyril Morris,
The Dregm_Hou§e: Silent Films gnd_§pani§h Poetg (n.c.:
University of Hull, 1977).

42. Virginia Higginbotham, "Reflejos de Lautréamont

en Poete en Nuegg York,” in Egderico Ggrcia_Lorcg, Gil

 

Idelfonso-Manuel, ed., p. 304.
43. Joeseph W. Zdenek, "Poete en Nuev§_York, Product
of Garcia Lorca's Subconsciousness or Superconsciousness?"

G rcia Lorcg;Beview, X, No. 2 (Spring, 1982): 62.

—_—-

 

44. Roy Campbell, Lorcgi_An Apprgglgtion of his
Poetry (New York: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 71.
Joseph W. Zdenek offers another interpretation of the
Lorca—Dali relationship which should also be considered:
"Dali went to Paris to create something like a revolution

in surrealistic art the same year that Garcia Lorca went

42

in the opposite direction to New York. During the period
when he was closest to Deli and under his greatest
influence, Lorca wrote the poems which characterize him as
a poet of nature and of the people: Libro de poemgg,
Cents 10ndo, and the Romanceroggitggg. Thus, at a
historical moment when Garcia Lorca could have written
very surrealistic poetry, he wrote in a style opposed to
surrealism" (Joseph W. Zdenek, "Subconsciousness or
Superconsciousness," p. 63.

45. Betty Jean Craige, Lorca’s ’Poet In New York':
The Fgll Into Consciougnesg (Lexington, KY: The University
of Kentucky Press, 1977.

46. Federico Garcia Lorca, "Cancion para la lune,"
in Libro de pogmgs, . . ., p. 29. The precise line is,
"Ya habréis notado/ que soy nihiliste."

47. José Ortega, "Poetg_gn NuevggYork: Alienacién
social y surrealismo," Nueva Estafeta, 18 (mayo, 1980):
46.

48. Juan Cano Ballesta, Litergturggy,tecnolggigi
las letras espaﬁoles ante l§_revolucién indugtri§l_(1900—
1233) (Madrid: Editorial Origenes, S. A., 1981), p. 209.

49. Germén Gullén makes this assertion abundantly
clear when he writes, ". . . Federico Garcia Lorca ocupa
en la memoria del pueblo espaﬁol e1 lugar del escritor
comprometido por excelencia con los principios morales de

la Segunda Repﬁblice, su mértir. Creo que esa percepcion

de Garcia Lorca, que algunos traten de olvidar diciendo

43
que se base en un mal entendimiento de su obra se
confunden, pues, en mi opinion, la obra poética de

Federico Garcia Lorca, en especial el Romgncero gitano

 

(1928) y Poet§;en Nuevleork (1940) reflejan e1 espiritu
que hizo posible e1 advenimiento de la Republica mejor que
la de ningﬁn otro poeta: en su obra florece e1 liberalismo
espaﬁol, que sezono en la primavera de 1931" (German
Gu116n, "Garcia Lorca y la Segunda Republica Espeﬁola,"
§_rgi§,Lorca;Review, X, No. 1 (Spring, 1982): 16.

Eduardo Castro cites evidence which corroborates

Gullon’s opinion: "Por ultimo, en visperas de las

elecciones de febrero de 1936, Lorca llegé asimismo g

 

mgnifestgrse como ferviente frentepopuligtg, segﬁn se
refleja en una de las aporteciones que Gibson considers
mas importante de la ﬁltima edicién de su libro: un
manifiesto a favor del Frente Popular, publicado en las
peginas del periodico comunista Mundo obrero el 15 de
febrero——es decir, un die antes de las elecciones—-, cuya
large lista de trescientos signatorios eparece,
precisamente, encabezada por Garcia Lorca y Rafael

Alberti. Bajo el titulo de Los intelectuales, con el

 

bloquegpopulgg, e1 documento termina diciendo, en
trenscripcion literal: "No individualmente, sino como
representacién nutrida de la clase intelectual de Espaﬁa,
confirmamos nuestre adhesion al Frente Popular, porque
buscemos que la libertad sea respetada, el nivel de vida

ciudedano elevado y la culture extendida a las mes

44
diversas capes del pueblo." Tachar, pues, de "apolitico"
a1 poeta y dramaturgo de Fuente Vaqueros no 8610 resulta
totalmente injustificado, sino que puede ademés
considerarse como una de 1as mas gordas y estﬁpidas
patraﬁas inventadas por el regimen del general Franco para

tratar de paliar, precisamente, uno de los mayores

"errores" politicos de sus comienzos." Eduardo Castro,
”El compromiso politico—social de Garcia Lorca," in Homage
a Federico GgrciggLorcg (Toulouse: Université de

 

Toulouse, n. d.), p.11.

Antonina Rodrigo gives further proof that Garcia
Lorca was in no conceivable way, an "apolitical” writer:
"El 6 de noviembre [de 1935], un grupo de intelectuales
espaﬁoles firmaron en Madrid un manifiesto que reprodujo
1a prense nacional, encabezado con estas palabras: ’Nadie
tiene derecho a destruir vidas, bienes, e instituciones,
por el gusto de ejercer una politica imperialista
arbitraria y dominadora.’ Y terminabe invitando a
'nuestros compatriotas para prestar apoyo a Etiopia y a
cualquier pueblo que puede, en el presents 0 en el
porvenir, ver desconocidos sus derechos a la vida y a la
libertad [Renovgc16n, Barcelona, 28/12/35, p. 14].' Lo
firmeban Teofilo Hernando, Antonio Mechedo, Fernando de
los Rios. . . . Luis Jimenez de Asﬁe y Federico Garcia
Lorca” (Antonina Rodrigo, Garcia Lorca en Cataluﬁa
(Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, S. A., 1975), pp. 351—

352).

CHAPTER I

THE TEXTUAL TRADITION OF POETA EN NUEVA YORK

 

Fifteen years ago, a polemic was generated among
Garcia Lorca scholars concerning the "correct" composition
of Poet§_en Nuevg_York (PNY). At the root of the problem
are the unusual circumstances under which the work was
published. A rigorous investigation of the two sides in
this debate must be undertaken in order to determine
which—~if any—-of the two originally published versions
presents the correct canon, or order of the poems, in the
work.

The poems which comprise Poetggen NueVQgYork were
written in 1929 and 1930. In 1936, on the eve of the
outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and just weeks before
his assassination, Garcia Lorca entrusted the manuscript
of these poems to his friend José Bergamin. Lorca
continued to work and rework his New York poems in the six
year span between their original writing and his death.

He frequently mentioned in correspondence and at
interviews that he planned to publish the poems in two

separate works, Poete en Nueva York, and Tierrggy lung

 

(1). These allusions, which were made repeatedly
(especially during the years 1930-1933) have been the
subject of careful investigation by Lorca scholars,

45

46

because the poems were, in the end, published as one
volume in 1940, four years after the poet's death. Thus,
the polemic regarding Lorca's "lest intents" was born.
Editorial Losada of Buenos Aires was the first to
attempt a publication of a work entitled Poete en Nueva

York in 1938, in an edition of the Obrag,complet§g of

 

Garcia Lorca, compiled by Guillermo de Torre (2).
Guillermo de Torre openly acknowledged that the canon of
the New York poetry was deficient and largely arbitrary.

He explained in the "Introduction" to the Obrgg completes

 

that he had been unable to obtain the complete manuscript
from a ”friend of the poet (a sarcastic reference to José
Bergamin, whose possession of the original manuscript was
common knowledge at the time).” He was thus forced to
publish an incomplete edition of the work, gleaned from a
collection of Lorca's New York poetry which had appeared
sporadically in various journals from 1930 to 1936.

In 1940, two editions of ﬁg: appeared within weeks of
each other. The Norton bilingual edition, translated by
Rolfe Humphries, appeared first in New York (3), and
Editorial Séneca, the Mexican company founded by José
Bergamin in residence in Mexico, published the Spanish
version a few weeks later (4). It was not until 1972 that
any serious concern was shown for the orthographic,
grammatical, and stylistic discrepancies between the two
editions. The versions are vastly different: some poems

were omitted in the Sénece edition, and included in an

47

appendix, along with several "variantes" of certain poems
found in the main body of the text. The Norton edition
was missing several poems as well. The Sénece edition
also included much more punctuation and strophic
divisions, leading some modern—day critics to conclude
that one of these editions—-or both~~ do not accurately
reflect Garcia Lorca's original intents. It is most
interesting to note that if the New York Norton edition
had been published only in English translation and not in
both languages, there would be no polemic concerning the
order and structure of the poems. However, in such a
case, Jose Bergamin's possible tampering with the poems
(which will be discussed later) would never have come to
light, and Lorca scholars would be all the worse for that
lack of knowledge.

One probable explanation as to why Lorca scholars--
even those highly dedicated to the study of this work——
have tended to avoid careful analyses of the narrative
structure of the collection is this intense controversy
which exists regarding the correct position of each poem
in the composition, a consequence of the circumstances of
its publication, described above. In 1972, Eutemio Martin
suggested in an article (based on his doctoral
dissertation) published in Insula, that the composition of
the published versions of Poete en Nueva York was more the
work of Bergamin than of the poet himself (5). Martin's

article was extremely valuable, because it was the first

48

to discuss the irregularities of the Norton and Seneca
editions.

Cognizant of the fact that Martin’s discovery was not
made public until 1972, the Lorca scholar must view all
literary criticism of the New York poetry written prior to
that time in a new light. Many studies made prior to that
date——and many afterwards as well~—payed little or no
attention to the structural problems. Even the very well
known modern studies by critics such as Betty Jean Craige
(6) and Richard Predmore (7) fail to take the structural
question into account. For example, Richard Predmore
makes the following observation concerning the
compositional problems:

Poet§_en NueVQgYork resulta ser un libro
sumamente dificil de interpreter, no 3610 por
su novadoso lenguaje poético sino tembién por
el carécter problematico de un texto no
publicado haste después de la muerte del autor.
Hay problemas textuales de todas clases:
puntueciones probablemente equivocadas,
variaciones de edicion que afectan seriamente
la interpretacién de algunas poesias, y sobre
todo, dudes respecto a la entereze estructural
del libro (8).
but once having acknowledged them, proceeds to analyze the
work completely ignoring these problems. Betty Jean
Craige does much the same. This is not to say that their
studies are flawed, for they are both scrupulous
investigations of particular elements in the work, but
Perhaps had they not ignored the profound structural

asPects of the book, their studies would have been richer.

1972 was the pivotal year in literary criticism with

49

regards to Poete en NueV§_York. As mentioned, critics
prior to that date had not been troubled by any of the
textual problems which emerged from Martin’s insightful
comparison of the two first editions of the work. Those
who dealt with the work after that year, and who ignored
the problem of the ”text” did so in order to simplify
their studies. Others, such as Daniel Eisenberg, Miguel
Garcia Poseda, and Andrew A. Anderson openly addressed the
problems inherent in establishing a canon for PNY.
The three critics are in agreement on one point——that
José Bergemin holds the key to a solution to the
structural problem. Both Martin and Eisenberg suspect, at
the very least, that Bergemin tempered with the text which
Lorca left in his possession in 1936 shortly before his
death. Eisenberg makes the following comparison between
the Séneca (Mexican) and Norton (American, bilingual)
editions:
Al analizar estos poemes descubrimos que hay
una sorprendente diferencia entre e1 texto de
Humphries y el de Bergemin. La diferencia
consists en la puntuecién. En la edicion de
Humphries por ejemplo, vemos que el poema
"Vuelta de paseo" no lleva ningdn signo de
puntuecién, exceptuando los signos de
exclamacion del final, mientras que el texto de
Bergemin lleva dos comes y cinco puntos. (9)
Eisenberg later implies that Bergemin simply tempered with
the text in ways that Garcia Lorca would not have desired.
Examples of textual variation between the two

editions are numerous. Punctuation is different in the

two, strophes are formed differently, and in some cases

50

entire words are different. In some extreme instances,
such as in the poem "Nocturno del hueco," the American
version differs in numerous lines from the Mexican
edition. Three comparisons will demonstrate the degree of
variation found between the two. In Bergemin's edition,
some verses from the poem ”Norma y paraiso de los negros"
are rendered as follows:
Amen el azul desierto,

1as vecilantes expresiones bovinas,

1a mentirosa lune de los polos,

la danza curve del agua en la orilla (10).
while the lines appear in the Norton edition in this manner:

Amen el cielo desierto

1as vecilantes expresiones bovinas

la mentirosa luna de los polos

la danza curve del agua en la orilla (11)
An entire word changes in the first verse from one edition
to the other, which in turn affects the interpretation of
the poem. A "blue desert” and a "deserted sky” are
certainly very distinct images, and if the reader is
unaware of the textual problems which bear directly on
this image and others within the work, then they will be
able to make a only partial analysis of the poems at best.
The differences with regards to punctuation are marked as
well. Bergemin's edition has three of the four verses
cited above ending in commas: the Norton edition has none.

Numerous discrepancies may be found in the poem "El

rey de Harlem.” For example, in the Séneca edition, the

lines rendered,

Negros, Negros, Negros, Negros.

51

James sierpe, ni cebre, ni mule
padecieron a1 morir (12)

appear in a dissimilar fashion in the Norton edition:
iNegros! iNegros! iNegros! iNegros!
James sierpe, ni cabra, ni mule,
padecieron a1 morir (13).
In this case, there is change in strophic divisions as
well as a change of wording (cebre, cabra), and
punctuation irregularities as well. The exclamation
points of the Norton edition add an extra tone of vibrancy
to the first verse: the commas of the Seneca edition
create a more monotonous or droning tone. A comparison of
these two editions produces a myriad of these types of
discrepancies. Furthermore, and more importantly for the
purposes of this study, the canons of the two editions are
markedly different. The table of contents in the Norton
edition reads in part as follows:
I. Poems of Solitude at Columbia University (Poemes
de la Soleded en Columbia University)
-*Promenade (Vuelta de Paseo)
~~1910, Interlude (1910, Intermedio)
—-Dawn (La Aurora)
—-Round of the Three Friends (Fébula y rueda de
los tres Amigos) (14)
and the table of contents in the Séneca edition differs
quite markedly from it:
II. Poemas de la Soleded en Columbia University
-—Vuelte de Paseo
——1910 (Intermedio)
-—Fébula y Rueda de los Tres Amigos
—-Tu infancie en Menton (15)

In just this first subdivision of the ten subdivisions in

the book, irregularities in the canon may be seen. The

52

Norton edition has included "La Aurora" as the third poem
of the book: Bergemin placed it as the sixteenth poem of
the book. "Tu infancie en Menton,” included as the fourth
poem of the book in the Séneca edition was omitted
entirely from the Norton edition. It has been supposed
that Norton was simply unable to acquire a copy of this
poem which he knew was to be included. Most critics today
accept its placement as it is in the Séneca edition, based
upon the similarity in theme and tone with the other three
poems of the first subdivision.

It is plainly evident that before any analysis of the
work can be made which emphasizes the inherent narrative
structure of the poetry, as definitive a text as at this
date can be established must be selected.

As already noted, Lorca scholars are indebted to
Eutemio Martin for bringing the textual questions to their
attention in 1972. Even Daniel Eisenberg, his most
"strident" critic, is in debt to him in this regard.

As was noted above, both scholars attribute the
discrepancies in the 1940 editions to José Bergemin, but
hold diverging theories as to precisely why the two texts
appeared in the forms which they did. Eisenberg believes
that Bergemin simply tampered with the original
manuscript, going as far as to alter radically the order
of the poems in a way that he believes violated Lorca’s
intention. 0n the other hand, Martin believes that

Bergemin simply had two copies made of the manuscript,

53

sending one to the translator Rolfe Humphries in New York
for use in producing the Norton edition, and using the
other as a basis for the Seneca edition. Eisenberg flatly
accuses José Bergemin of hoarding the original manuscript
entrusted to him by Lorca:
No creo que sea imaginable que Bergemin haya
dejado este manuscrito, de un valor enorme tanto
desde el punto de vista economico como
literario, se haya extraviedo de un modo casual,
después de haberlo guardado celosamente durante
los aﬁos de la guerra civil: si 10 he dejado o
quiza 10 he vendido, debs eﬁn saber
perfectamente a qué manos lo confié. Mi
conclusion es que Bergemin todavia tiene e1
manuscrito pero no quiere colaborar con la
familia Lorca en la edicion critica de las obras
de Federico tanto tiempo aplazada. Bergemin no
esta precisemente en buenas relaciones con la
familia Lorca (16).
Bergemin counters Eisenberg's accusation by claiming that
he gave the original manuscript to his son-in-law, and was
unable to locate it several years later after his son-in—
law had died (17). It is at this critical juncture that
Eisenberg and Martin differ. Martin believes that the
edition which was published in 1940 by Bergemin's Mexican
publishing company was indeed taken directly from the
original. Thus, he agrees with Eisenberg that Bergemin is
the culprit in the textual tampering, but his accusation
is somewhat different from that of Eisenberg: he believes
that Bergemin may very well be hiding an original, but
for very different reasons than those presented by

Eisenberg. Martin believes that Bergemin does not wish to

release the original manuscript because by so doing, he

54

will be opening himself up to charges of tampering with
the text entrusted to him by Lorca (18). Thus, both
Martin and Eisenberg are certain that José Bergemin must
be very much involved in any real solution to the textual
problem. In addition, both are of the opinion that the
edition published by Séneca in 1940 is 9g; the text most
representative of Garcia Lorca's desire for that work.

In fact, both critics depict José Bergemin as a less than
legitimate publisher, who was well capable of committing
the actions which they attribute to him. Martin writes,
”Poete en Nuegg*York lo publice Bergemin en Méjico, sin
e1 'copyright' de los herederos del poeta. Es algo
perfectamente ilegal y Bergemin no tenia por qué ignorarlo
(19).” Eisenberg tends to echo Martin's low opinion of
Bergemin, and in his critical study, ’Poeta en Nueva

York:' Higtoriggygproblemas de un tgxto de Lorcg, he not

 

only accuses José Bergemin of "underhendedness" in this
particular case, but implies that he and his Seneca
publishing company were often involved in questionable
practices (20).

The frustration of these two investigators is plainly
evident in their writings on this subject. Their zealous
investigations of the textual problems of Poet§_en Nuevg
1955 are admirable, and each has engendered more
conscientious consideration of this problem by other Lorca
scholars. Both have implicated Bergemin in a conspiracy

or a campaign to conceal an original manuscript, or tamper

55

with the one entrusted to his care. Up until this time,
Bergemin has denied both charges, and the serious
investigator can do no more than to proceed with analyses
of the work based upon the most up to date evidence and
research of the textual problems. On occasion, it has
been suggested that the Garcia Lorca family may be
harboring a definitive manuscript of Poets en Nueva York
in the family archives, but until such time as one does
come to light, the arguments of the main contenders in the
polemic concerning the text should be compared and
contrasted with regards to their potential merit, and then
a choice should be made.

Eutemio Martin, as already noted, was the first to
issue a challenge to José Bergemin to produce the original
manuscript of Poets en Nueva York in a 1972 article in
Insula. Some years later in his critical edition of PNY,
Martin comments on Bergemin's response to his plea:

'José Bergemin dio la cellada por respuesta pero, une vez
que Insula lanzé 1a cuestion a los cuatro vientos del
hispenismo, tuvo que resignarse al acoso de la legitima
curiosidad de los lorquistas (21)J' In his doctoral
dissertation dealing with the problem, his investigations

led him to conclude that Poet§_en Nueva York, as published

 

in 1940 in both editions was radically reconstructed from
the form in which the poet had originally desired it to
appear.

In order to establish his hypothesis, Martin relied

56

heavily on the transcriptions of several of Garcia Lorca's
"conferencia—recitales" which Lorca presented often during
the years 1932—1933. Martin notes that at those lectures,
Lorca often followed certain patterns in the manner in
which he presented the poetry. Before reading each poem,
he would relate the creative process that led to the
poem's composition, oftentimes using anecdotes and
personal biographical references. The conferences
generally followed a chronological narration. It is
important to remember that the New York poems during these
years had not been published as a complete work, but that,
in spite of this, the public knew a great deal about them.
Besides his numerous conferences, Lorca also permitted a
large number of the New York poems to appear in various
journals throughout Spain.

Having studied the "conferencias" in detail, Martin
next appealed directly to the Lorca family for assistance.
He was permitted to peruse the family archives, and in the
process, and much to his astonishment, discovered that
Garcia Lorca had "scribbled" a list of poems, under the
title ligrr§_y lung on the back of one of the New York
poems, "El niﬁo Stanton."

Martin’s next step was to link the "conferencias"
with the discovery. Basing himself once again on the
early recitals, at which Lorca seldom read any of the
poems found on the back of ”Stanton," Martin concluded

that these poems were never meant to be included in a work

57

of poetry entitled Poetggen NueV§_York: "Del cotejo de
esta lista de titulos con lo que hemos inferido de la
conferencia-recital de Poet§_en Nueva York resulta una
interesante constatacion: Lorca no leyo ni aludié en ella
ninguno de los poemes que figuran en su lista de Tierra 2
luna (22)."

As further evidence of his claims, Martin cites an
interview that Garcia Lorca gave to a reporter from the
Hergldo degMgdrid shortly before his death:

——Y dime, ads libros en proyecto 0 en la realidad?

-—Tres libros, tres: el de ”Odes", empezado equi y

ahora terminado. Y dos de ella.
“'“UﬁOe
~-"Tierra y lune", trabejo en el campo, en Nueva
Inglaterra.

——0tro

-—Una interpretacién poética de Nueva York.

-—;Su titulo?

"'—"NUBV8 York”. e e (23) e
Finally, based upon correspondence and a personal
interview with Jose Bergemin, Martin concludes that Garcia
Lorca's original intention to publish the New York poetry
as two distinct works was completely ignored by José
Bergemin when his Séneca company produced the book in
1940: "Forzoso es concluir que la edicién, haste ahora
tenida por princeps, de Poete en Nueva York he sufrido un
trabajo de reconstruccién por parte de su responsable
(24).” During his personal interview with Bergemin
(conducted before the preceding statement was made),

Martin also took the opportunity to discredit Eisenberg's

assertion that the Humphries/Norton edition of Poets en

58
Nuevg York should be considered the most faithful
reproduction of the work:

E. M.——De lo que si esta Ud. seguro es que no se mand6

e1 original (to Norton)?

J. B.-—Pero, Lcémo se iba a mendar el original?

E. M.-—Discu1pe 1a pregunta que puede perecerle idiota
pero toda la tesis de Eisenberg esta besade
sobre la suposicién de que lo que Humphries
recibié de Séneca no fue une copia de Poete
gn Nuevg York sino el original mismo (25).
Based on a combination of all of the factors detailed

above, Martin introduced a radically redesigned edition of
the work Poet§_en Nuevngork in 1981. He separated the
poems which had until that time been incorporated in the
work entitled Poete en Nueva York into an entirely new
work entitled Tierrg y lung. Several critics, and Miguel
Garcia Posada in particular, praised the new edition:

Poseda used the fruits of Martin's research to publish an

Obras completes using the Poet§_en Nuevg York/Tierra y

 

 

1333 division (26). Other critics such as Daniel
Eisenberg, Maria Clemente Millén, and Andrew A. Anderson,
condemned the division outright.

As mentioned, with the publication, in 1981, of a new
rendition of the Obrgggcomplgggg of Federico Garcia Lorca,
Miguel Garcia Posada placed himself strongly in the camp
of Eutemio Martin with regards to the bisection of the
earlier Poete en Nueva York into two distinct poetic
compositions. He writes in his "Introduccién,"

Hoy, tras 1as investigaciones de Eutemio Martin
y Daniel Eisenberg, no es posible seguir

editando el texto mexicano, ni en su estructura
ni en las versiones de los poemes. La

59

biparticion del libro hasta ahora conocido en
dos conjuntos, Poet; en Nuegg York y Tierra z
luna, postulada por el primero de los
investigadores, parece, al menos con la actual
documentacién, una solucién filolégica razonable
(27).

In addition to what he terms a philological solution,
Garcia Posada bases himself largely on the contents of
Garcia Lorca's early conferencigrrecitgles, at which Lorca
refrained from reading the poems from Martin’s
reconstructed Tierrguy lung, those which he discovered
written on the back of a manuscript of the original of "El
niﬁo Stanton" in the Lorca family archives:
En el texto de la conferencia—recital, los
poemas siguen en un orden cronologico claro, que
corresponds a las diversas etapas del viaje.
Ese orden preside 1a proyectada estructura de la
version hasta ahora conocida. Consideramos, por
tanto, factible, y lorguiano, estructurar el
texto restablecido en seis bloques, que pueden
ir titulados con fragmentos seleccionados de la
conferencia (28).
This assertion, much in harmony with Martin’s hypothesis,
has recently been given some discredit by researchers such
as Maria Clemanta Millén, who points out that three of the
titles on the list on the back of "Stanton” were later
included by Lorca in Divan del Tamarit:
El segundo testimonio importante de Lorca con

que contamos para el esclarecimiento de estos
poemas es la lista manuscrita de Tierraﬁy lung

 

(. . .)y que tembién ha servido para establecer la

division de estas creaciones en libros
distintos, aceptando como componentes de esta
obra los poemas aparecidos en el manuscrito.
Sin embargo, esta lista inicial, fechada
probablemente hacia 1933, fue sufriendo
modificaciones hasta 1936, ya que tres de sus
poemas, por intervencion directa de Lorca,
pasaron a formar parte del Divan del Tamarit, y

 

60

otros como "Asesino" y "Nocturno del hueco",
estarian fluctuantes entre ambos poemarios.
Todo ello nos demuestra, en primer lugar, e1
caracter no definitivo de esta lista, y en
segundo lugar, la estrecha relacién entre Poeta
en Nueva_:ork y Tierr§_y lung, que en ningﬁn
caso podrian ser compartimientos estancos, como
asi parece evidenciarlo el "Insectiario"
mencionado por Lorca (29).

Millan's observations do some damage to both Martin and
Garcia Posada’s newer editions of the work, especially
when she points out that Lorca himself at one time, pulled
three of the poems from this list in order to be included
in another work altogether.
Garcia Posada Justifies his edition of Tierra x lung,
as does Martin, by citing the same interview which Lorca
gave to the Heraldo de Madrid in 1936. The following
words of Garcia Posada are extremely similar to those of
Martin:
En conjunto, dieciocho poemas que componen una
crénica poética [Poetaien Nueva York] de acuerdo
con la estructura tipica del género: llegada,
estancia y partida. Pero Nueva York inspira
también a Lorca un libro muchos menos
descriptive, Tierr§;y lung, al que el poeta se
refirié desde los dias de Nueva York hasta 1a
ﬁltima entrevista de su vida, y cuya existencia
esta atestiguada por el hallazgo de un indice
encontrado a1 dorso de un manuscrito de ”El niﬁo
Stanton", en los archivos de la familia Lorca
(30).

It is undeniable that Garcia Lorca, at the time of his

last interview, was planning to publish a work entitled

Tierra z luna. However, Lorca’s assertion during that

final interview should also be considered in conjunction

with the words of a close friend and fellow poet Vicente

61

Aleixandre, who makes the following observation, . . .
[Garcia Lorca] era muy aficionado a inventar titulos de
libros (31)."

There are some areas of Martin and Garcia Posada’s
research which are questionable, and it should be noted
that, at times, their research has led to different
conclusions. This final element of their research still
remains to be examined, that is, where the two diverge in
their views of the structure of the work. Garcia

Posada's Obras completes relied heavily upon Martin'

 

schism of Poeta_en Nueva York into two separate works, but
even Garcia Posada refrained from using Martin's exact
version. For example, Garcia Posada does not locate the
poem ”Iglesia abandonada" in the second section of the
work, whereas Martin does (32). Additionally, and very
much contrary to Martin's theory, Garcia Posada tends to
accept the earlier Norton edition for its structure and
punctuation in each individual poem, and only rejects the
ordering of the poems:
Hay que rendirse a la evidencia: el manuscrito
dejado por Lorca en el despacho de Bergemin no
era, desde luego, un manuscrito definitive,
dispuesto para la edicién. E1 juicio de
Eisenberg de que el original estaba "mas o menos
terminado", puede aceptarse, aunque con
matizaciones, para los textos, no para la
estructura del libro (33).
This assertion, however, is soundly criticized by Andrew

A. Anderson, who believes that Garcia Posada has no right

to accept the Humphries edition as being textually

62

faithful on the one hand, and to reject it with regards to
its canon on the other:

As I said in passing in the preliminary remarks
to this review [of Garcia Posada's rendition of
Lorca's Obras completes], there is a fundamental
contradiction——illogicality——lying at the heart
of Posada's position. Between them, and by
comparing them, Norton and Séneca are good
enough to provide the individual copy—texts but
not good enough to determine the canon and the
order (34).

 

Daniel Eisenberg, who has already been mentioned several
times in this discussion, has been substantially involved
in this textual controversy since he published his book on
2!: in 1976 (35). His extensive research has led him to
drastically different conclusions from those of Martin and
Garcia Poseda, and his theories are fundamental in
determining a "definitive" text of the New York poetry.
Eisenberg’s premise is that Martin has constructed a
completely arbitrary and ficticious work entitled Tierra 1
lug; based upon inadequate evidence. His main argument
with Martin (and thus, naturally, with Garcia Posada) is
that Martin relied far too heavily on the substance of

Garcia Lorca's conferencigr recitales in formulating a new

 

poetic composition. His comments are brusk, and
oftentimes unflattering to Martin, and have thus created
tension between them.

Al formular todas estas suposiciones Martin
muestra una gran falta de sentido comﬁn y un
conocimiento superficial de la bibliografia
lorquiana. Hoy en die contamos con unos
materiales que podrian ayudarnos, aunque
modestamente a establecer e1 esquema general de
Poe§§_en Nueva York si nunca hubiese llegado a

63

publicarse (36).
Eisenberg believes, with some Justification, that Garcia
Lorca had ample time between the presentation of his
lectures, ending roughly in 1933, to rework the poetry
into a single composition before his death in 1936.
According to Eisenberg, the fact that Lorca was still
alluding to a work entitled Tierr§;y lung in 1936 is
explained by the simple fact that Lorca had another work
bearing this title projected which he was never able to
actually complete due to his tragic assassination. There
is, however, a more important difference between Martin
and Eisenberg's theories. Eisenberg insists that the copy
of the text from which Humphries took the 1940 bilingual
edition published by Norton is the most faithful textually
and canonically to the intents of the poet. He
categorically denies Martin and Garcia Poseda's belief
that Lorca intended the poems to be published as two
distinct works, noting that a full three years passed
between the conferencia-recitales and the poet's death,
which was ample time for Garcia Lorca to restructure the
order. He also believes that Bergemin sent the original
manuscript of Poet§;en Nueva York to Humphries to be
translated (37):

Antes que nada, queda claro que Humphries

trabajo a partir del manuscrito original que

Lorca dejo en el despacho de Bergemin y que no

uso una copia que de este original tal vez

hubiese podido hacer Bergemin 0 un mecanégrafo

de Nueva York. En su "Note del treductor"
Humphries habla detalladamente de este original

64

mecanografiedo y de lo que permitia suponer
acerce de las intenciones de Lorca, pero no
insistio en que éste era el manuscrito original
de Lorca porque no le pasé por la cabeza que
ésta pudiese ser una cuestion polémica (38).
Furthermore, Eisenberg implicitly condemns Bergemin for
altering the poet's original manuscript before publishing
the Sénece edition. He accuses Bergemin of having
corrected punctuation and strophic division which should
never really have been changed (39). Anticipating a
possible argument that perhaps it was Humphries who
tampered with the original, and not Bergemin, Eisenberg
explains that it would be very rare for an editor to
delete punctuation; but rather, that an editor would be
more inclined to add punctuation due to the editing
process:
For muy chapucero e irresponsable que sea, a
ningﬁn editor se le ocurre coger el manuscrito
que ve a publicar y quitar sistematicamente
puntos al final de 1as frases y comes an medio
de grupos de palabras. Sin embargo, es muy
posible que un editor aﬁada sistematicamente 1a
puntuecion a una obra que a su entender carece
de ella (40).

It was demonstrated earlier that Martin believes Jose
Bergemin when he claims not to have sent an original to
Rolfe Humphries in order to produce a bilingual edition of
the work. Martin also cites a letter written by Bergemin
April 2, 1977 to Ian Gibson to refute Eisenberg's premise.
In this letter, Bergemin claims that he made a gift of the

original manuscript to his son-in-law Eduardo Ugarte, and

that at some time while in his possession, the original

65

manuscript was lost:

Yo recuerdo que en Sénece se hicieron dos
copies, una para Norton—Humphries y otra para
utilizarla nosotros, para no tener que enviar e1
texto original a la imprenta: y ambas, claro es,
cuidadosamente exactas: copies que cuidaron y
revisaron conmigo, entre otros amigos de
Federico y mios, Emilio Prados (el poeta) y
Eduardo Ugarte (mi cuﬁado, muy amigo de
Federico) a quien éste habia regalado e1
original de Llanto, y al que di éste del Poete
en Nueva York porque me lo pidié. Siempre crei
que él lo tendria. Sin embargo, su viuda (mi
cuﬁade) no he podido encontrarlo, segﬁn me dijo,
entre los papeles de su marido. . . (41).

Eisenberg tends to be much more skeptical of Bergemin's
assertions concerning the original manuscript and thus
strongly questions the above statements:
Nuestras conclusiones pueden resumirse
rapidamente de este modo: Lorca dio un
manuscrito de Poete mas o menos terminado a
Bergemin, quien a su vez lo presto a Humphries.
El texto de Humphries es mas fiel a este
manuscrito de lo que 10 es el de Bergemin. Al
falter este manuscrito, e1 texto de Humphries es
el que debe preferirse: los poemas que faltan en
el manuscrito deben estudiarse como casos
individueles (42).
The frictions which have been created between the
principals of this polemic are unfortunate and
counterproductive. At times it seems that the goal of
determining a definitive textual version of Poets en Nueva
York has taken a back seat to personal intellectual
vanities. The research done on this has been instructive
in the process of fixing a text, and it is, in the end,
more fruitful to compare and contrast critics' findings,

than embracing Just one position while rejecting out of

hand the other. What has been needed in this debate was a

66

more objective voice outside the oftentimes belligerent
atmosphere of the Martin-Eisenberg-Posada posturing.
Andrew A. Anderson's recent work on the subject
provides that perspective. This critic offers some
extremely convincing evidence which tends to discredit the
hypotheses of Martin and Garcia Posada. In two highly
detailed articles he examines both sides of the polemic,
and takes care to include some of Garcia Lorca’s
biographical data which he deems vital to an understanding
of the textual composition. Anderson believes that Garcia
Lorca had, by the end of 1933, already fixed the canon of
PNY in a way quite similar to its appearance in Norton in
1940, incorporating into it several poems which he had
earmarked years before for use in his abandoned project,
Tierra z lune (43). Anderson's findings are, of course,
much more supportive of Eisenberg's theories than of those
of Martin and Garcia Poseda. Anderson goes on to cite an
instance in which a poem which Martin claims belongs
undeniably to Tierra y lune, was referred to by Lorca as
part of Poet§_en Nuevg_York:
In the first number of Caballo verde para la
poesia, October 1935, the poem "Nocturno del
hueco" appeared with a note 'Del libro inédito
Poete en Nueva York.” Given that "Nocturne del
hueco" appears on the Tierrgjyglung list, this
seems to clinch the hypothesis of the conflation
of the two canons, by the autumn of 1935 at the
latest, but, as I have suggested, more probably
at the turn of 1933-34 (44).

Anderson's conclusions, on the whole, support those of

Eisenberg. He believes that Garcia Lorca entrusted a

67

manuscript to José Bergemin, who, in turn, made a
typescript of it in order to send to Rolfe Humphries for
use as the basis of the New York bilingual edition. Thus,
he believes that Eisenberg is definitely correct when he
states that the Humphries/Norton edition of the work is
the one which should be used as the definitive text:
Discounting errata and occasional titivating on
Humphries' part (which is only likely given his
editorial scrupulousness, when he really could
make no sense of a word or phrase, or actually
had to supply a missing poem), the Norton
Spanish text therefore represents Lorca's
manuscript as faithfully as Bergemin's typists'
efforts and the legibility of the original would
have allowed (45).
Anderson's more dispessionate approach to the textual
problem may be summed up in the following manner. He
believes that Bergemin unnecessarily "normalized" Lorca's
manuscript. He also argues convincingly that most of the
discrepancies in the two editions published in 1940 are so
minimal that there is absolutely no call whatsoever to
reconstruct the texts as radically as Martin and Garcia
Posada did (46).

Based upon a careful consideration of all of the
above research, the 1940 Humphries/Norton edition, with
slight modification, should be used as the definitive
edition of Poete en Nueva York until such time when, or
if, a new manuscript is located. Eisenberg’s research, as
well as that of Anderson, demonstrates convincingly that

Garcia Lorca had, by the time of his death, conceptualized

the New York poetry as a single poetic composition.

68

Eisenberg's argument that the Sénece edition was tampered
with should be accepted by virtue of his observation that
editors would seldom delete punctuation from any given
text.

Martin and Garcia Posada's theory that Tierrg x_lung
was a distinct and defintive text projected by the poet is
refuted by the fact that "Nocturno del hueco" was
indicated as belonging to Poete en Nueva York. And
furthermore, as both Eisenberg and Anderson point out, the
substance of some conferencig:recitglgg given in the years
1933-34 are insufficient to substantiate the separation of
the two works. It is well—known that Garcia Lorca
continually re—worked all of his poetic creations
substantially, until the time when he submitted them to
his publishers. Furthermore, the observation by Maria
Clemente Millan that several of the poems listed on the
back of "El niﬁo Stanton" were later included, at Lorca’s
wish, in Divan del Tamarit demonstrates that Lorca was in
the process of, if not in fact, finished with, dividing

the poems once belonging to Tierrg y lung among other

 

books of poetry.

In some of the most extensive and scrupulous research
carried out to date concerning Poete en Nuevg_York, Maria
Clemente Millén substantiates Eisenberg and Anderson's
fundamental assertion: that Poete en Nuegg York should
never have been separated into two distinct works:

Como consecuencia de lo aducido anteriormente,

69

podriamos decir que no es fécil admirer la
division de estos poemas americenos en libros
distintos, teniendo en cuenta, en primer lugar,
que los puntos de apoyo fundamentales, con que
contamos para esta distincién, conferencia y
lista de poemes, son insuficientes como razones
exclusives para esta diferenciacién. Y, en
segundo lugar, que un estudio interno de los
poemas pone en tele de juicio esta division, ya
que, a nuestro parecer, no existen diferencies
suficientemente importantes entre las creaciones
que compondrian ambos poemarios para poder
ratificarla (47).

Taken in consort with the findings of both Eisenberg
and Anderson, Millén’s Opinions form a sound basis for
rejecting Martin's basic assumptions. Therefore, the
Norton/Humphries edition of Poete en Nueva York will be
used as the definitive text in this dissertation for an
analysis of the structural narrative of the composition.
Only two modifications will be made. These are the
inclusion of the poems ”Tu infancie en Menton” and
"Crucifixion." With regards to the first, Lorca had
always intended that it form part of PNY, but it had been
unavailable to Humphries at the time of his translation.
With respect to the second, Lorca had indicated on several
occasions that he wished to include it as well, but in
1935 even he did not possess a copy of it. He was forced
therefore to write to a friend asking him to return his
copy (48). Although Lorca never did obtain a copy of the
poem during his lifetime, one did surface after his
assassination, and most critics favor placing it into the

canon of the work precisely where the Bergemin edition has

it. Virginia Higginbotham writes:

70

For fifteen years editions of Poetgjen Nuevg
York appeared without "Crucifixién" included,
due either to the unavailability of the
manuscript or through unewereness of its
omission. As the third and final poem of
Section VII, Angel del Rio remarks of
"Crucifixion," that "independently of the
external reasons, . . . it is evident that it
fits perfectly into the pattern of the book
where it has been placed (49).

Andrew A. Anderson agrees with del Rio and Higginbotham
(50). Having thus established the inclusion of both ”Tu
infancie en Menton" and "Crucifixién" within the work, the
canon and the text of Poetg_en Nuevg_York must, until new
evidence indicates otherwise, rely almost exclusively on

the Humphries/Norton edition.

NOTES

1. Andrew A. Anderson documents Lorca's early
plans in this way: "The title Tierrg y lung reappears
right at the end of 1932. The confgggncia—recitel which
Lorca gave in the Hotel Ritz, Barcelona, under the
auspices of the Conferencia Club, received at least three
newspaper reviews. . . it was only in the third of these
(. . .)that mention is made of this second American
collection [Tierrg y lung]. In spite of probable early
references in 1929, and precise references in late 1930
and late 1932, 1933 seems to have been the year in which
Tierrgg; lung rose to prominence in Lorca’s mind (Andrew
A. Anderson, “The Evolution of Garcia Lorca's Poetic
Projects 1929—36 and the Textual Status of Poetg en Nuevg
lggg,“ Bulletin of Higggnic Studieg, 61 (July 1983), p.
229.

2. Federico Garcia Lorca, Obggggcompleggg, Guillermo
de Torre, ed. (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1938).

3. Federico Garcia Lorca, The Poet In New York and

 

Other Poems of Federico Ggrgig_Lorcg: The Spanish Text
Hith g9 English Translationgby_Ro;;g Hugphrigg (New York:
Norton, 1940).

4 Federico Garcia Lorca, Poetggen NueVggjork por
Eggggico GgrcigLorcgL con cugtro dibujoggorigineles,
poema de Antonio Mechedo, prélggo dggJosé Bergemin

(Mexico: Editorial Sénece, 1940).

71

72

5. Eutemio Martin, "LExiste une version definitive
de Poetg en Nuevg_York, de Lorca?" Insula, 310 (1972): 1.

6. Betty Jean Craige, Lorca’s 'Poeta en Nueva
York': The Fgll Into Consciousness (Lexington, KY: The
University Press of Kentucky, 1977).

7. Richard L. Predmore, Lorcgfs New York Poetry:
Socigl Injusticenggrk Love, Lost Faith (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1980).

8. , p. 32.

 

9. Daniel Eisenberg, Poetggen NuevggYork: higtorig_z
problemggwde un texto de Lorcg (Barcelona: Editorial
Ariel, 1976), p. 126.

10. Garcia Lorca, Egggg (Sénece), p. 43.
11. Garcia Lorca, ﬁgggg (Norton), p. 32.
12. Garcia Lorca, Egggg (Sénece), p. 49.

13. Garcia Lorca, Poete (Norton), p. 40.

 

14. , (Norton), p. 5

 

15. , (Sénece), p. 185.

16. Eisenberg, Historie, pp. 92—93.

17. Federico Garcia Lorca, Poetggen NuengYork y
Tierra y Luna, Eutemio Martin, ed. (Barcelona: Editorial
Ariel, 1981). p. 29.

18. Martin explains his reasoning in this way: "Como
a nosotros sigue importandose el hellezgo del original del
libro neoyorquino de Lorca, tenemos que interrogarnos
sobre les razones de esta terca resistencie de Bergemin a

sacar a la luz pﬁblice este documento 0, al menos, e

73

facilitar e1 acceso a sus eventuales destentadores. . . La
rezén que creemos decisive del comportamiento de Bergemin
es que éste rehuse brinder él mismo la prueba irrefutable
de su abusive intervencion personal en un original que no
le fue entregado para la imprenta en esas condiciones."

(Garcia Lorca, Poetg/Tierra, p. 48.

 

19. , p. 58.
20. Eisenberg, Historie, p. 99.

21. Martin, in Lorca, Poete/Tierrg, p. 19.

 

 

 

 

 

22. , p. 85.
23. . P. 80.
24. , p. 25.
25. , p. 30.

26. Federico Garcia Lorca, Obras completes, Miguel
Garcia Poseda, ed. (Madrid: Akal Editor, 1982).

27. , pp. 63—4.

 

28. Miguel Garcia Poseda, Lorca: Interpretacion de

 

Poete en NuevggYork (Madrid: Akal Editor, 1981), p. 39.

29. Maria Clemente Millén, "Hacie un esclarecimiento
de los poemas americenos de Federico Garcia Lorca,”
Insula, 431 (October 1982): 14-15.

30. Garcia Poseda, Interprgggcidn, p. 21.

31. Gabriel Celaye, Poesia y vegdgd: ,pgpeles para un
proceso (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, S. A., 1979), pp.
147-8.

32. Martin, Poetg/Tierrg, p. 152.

33. Garcia Poseda, Interpretgcion, p. 2.

 

74

34. Andrew A. Anderson, "Reseﬁe" Reviste Canediense
de Estudiog_Hispgnicog, IX, No. 1 (Otoﬁo 1984), p. 122.
35. Eisenberg, Historia.

36. , p. 21.

 

37. Bergemin denied this theory outright in his
interview with Eutemio Martin (Garcia Lorca, Poete/Tierrg,
p. 30).

38. Eisenberg, Historia, p. 118.

39. These are Eisenbergs exact words: "Asi, pues, por
lo que se refiere a estos once poemas, la edicién de
Humphries del texto espaﬁol es admirable por haber
introducido tan poces modificaciones. Ya fuera por una
decision consciente, que es lo que yo imagino, ya por
alguna otra feliz circunstancia, reprodujo casi
exactemente e1 manuscrito que se le habia entregado. . . .
en una edicién critica es forzoso indicar la puntuecion
del manuscrito del autor con tents exectitud como puede
determinerse. El problems consists en que Bergemin
corrigié la puntuecibn de poemas y de versos que en modo
alguno necesitaban corregirse." Eisenberg, Historia, p.
135.

40. , p. 127.

 

41. Martin, p. 21.

42. Eisenberg, Historia, p. 171.

43. The following is Anderson's summation of the
gradual demise in Lorca's mind of the work Tierrggy lung:

I am sure that Lorca's second visit to the New World and

75
his contact with the people he met there had a profound
effect on the evolution of the way in which he envisaged
collecting his New York poems. I have argued elsewhere
that after his arrival in Buenos Aires in mid—October
1933, consultation with Pablo Neruda probably produced the

alternative title Introduccién e la muerte, a title which

 

was first used on the day of his arrival in Montevideo—~30
January 1934a—on the occasion of an impromtu recital of
the New York poems. The recital included "Ode a Walt
whitman", "Fébula y rueda de los tres amigos" and "Pequeﬁo
vale vienés". Given what we know of Poete en Nueyg_York
of 1932—33 and of Tierrg y lung of 1933, it seems highly

probable that the expansion of the canon of Poetggen Nueva

 

1955 to include these poesias more or less sueltes, and
the change of title to which the report of this recital
bears witness, coincide both with the bringing over of
those five poems originally in Tierrg y lung which we know
as Section VI of Poetg en Nuegg York (entitled precisely
"Introduccion a la muerte"), and possibly also with the
transferral of a further five poems from Tierrg y lung to
various other sections of Poete en Nuevg York as we know
it today. Although it is possible that some of these
changes did not take place till summer/autumn 1935

(. . .), it is nevertheless probable that it was at this stage-
-the turn of the year 1933—34-—that Poetggen NuevgﬁYork
(alias Introduccién e la muerte) assumed a form

considerably different from that indicated in the

76

conferencig7recitgl and close to that in which it appeared

 

in the 1940 editions." Anderson, "Evolution," p. 231.
The "elsewhere" to which Anderson refers is another
article he published in 1981. Andrew A. Anderson, "Garcia
Lorca en Montevideo: Un testimonio desconocido y mas
evidencia sobre la evolucion de Poetg‘en Nuevg_York,"
Bulletin Hisggnique, 83, 1—2 (Jan.—June, 1981), p. 8.

44. . p. 234-

 

 

45. , p. 239.

46. "I think that it is very important not to over—
exaggerate the differences between the Norton and Sénece
editions. A great many of them are of punctuation and
line or stanza distribution and disposition. It is clear
that Bergemin/Prados took it upon themselves to tidy up
and normalize Lorca's texts-—as to a large extent he might
well have expected of an editor—publisher-—whereas
Humphries took the opposite scholarly view of altering
nothing. Furthermore, it is entirely understandable that
in the process of transcription from difficult originals
and in the setting—up by a compositor of this
transcription for printing, some stanzas might have been
fused with others whilst others might have been created
(when the text of a poem goes over a page
misunderstandings can easily arise), and equally the odd
stanza might have been inadvertently omitted. The
remaining divergences suggest precisely that Lorca’s

modifications and revisions were sometimes hard to

77

decipher or interpret, and that on other occasions an open
or undecided revision had been made which would force a
choice on the part of the transcriber. It is in this way,
by positing an original heterogeneous manuscript of this
sort-—nearly completed, but certainly non—definitive——,
that the discrepancies may be satisfactorily explained.

It is my opinion that they are not nearly serious enough
to force us to adopt the extreme attitude propounded by
Martin and Garcia Poseda. Indeed, where both editions are
identical, there are very strong grounds for thinking
that, barring errata and the odd misreading that can be
controlled by reference to previous versions, the text is
reliable." Anderson, "Evolution," pp. 241—2.

47. Millén, p. 16.

48. The following is a fragment of the first letter
which Lorca wrote to Miguel Benitez Inglott y Aurina
requesting that he send him a copy of the poem:
"Queridisimo Miguel. Estoy poniendo a maquina mi libro de
Nueva York para darlo a las prensas e1 préximo mes de
octubre: te ruego encerecidamente me mendes a vuelta de
correo e1 poema "Crucifixion" puesto que t6 eres e1 ﬁnico
que lo tienes y yo me quedé sin copia. Federico Garcia
Lorca, Obrgg_complgggg (Madrid: Aguilar, 1954), p. 1260.
Having failed through this first letter to recover the
poem, Lorca again wrote to Benitez on August 14, 1935:
"Querido Miguel: Hace unos dies te escribi una carta

rogéndote me enviares mi poema "Crucifixion" que guardas

78

tﬁ. Como no he recibido contestacién, te lo vuelvo a
recorder, suplicéndote no dejes de hecerlo, pues es de los
poemas mas interesantes del libro y no quiero que se

pierde." Garcia Lorca, Obreg completes (Madrid: Aguilar,

 

1954), p. 1261.
49. Virginia Higginbotham, "The Son—Christ Image in

Poetg_en Nuevg York, QgrciggLorcg_Review, 8, No. 2 (Fall

 

1980): 117, 118, 125N.

50. This is how Anderson justifies the placement of
Crucifixion" in :31: The main source which Humphries
worked from in preparing his translations and texts for
the 1940 Norton edition was a typescript provided by
Bergemin which included several reminder sheets where the
texts of certain poems intended for inclusion were somehow
still missing. Lorca had no copy of "Crucifixion," and
tried to retrieve the text in August 1935, but was
unsuccessful. The reminder sheet paginated 67 in the
incomplete typewritten copy of the manuscript preserved in
Humphries' papers therefore states 'El poema numero [sic]
tres de esta parte se llama CRUCIFIXION y hay que pedir el
original a don Miguel Benitez [sic], Case Fiat,
Barcelona". Humphries’ assertion as well as a
reconstruction of the typeset allow us complete certainty
in placing "Crucifixion" as the intended third and last

poem of section VII, immediately following "Cementerio

judio." Anderson, "Evolution," p. 223.

CHAPTER TWO
An analysis of the narrative structure of Poete

en Nueva York must be preceded by a discussion of major
themes in the work. It is only through an awareness of
these themes that the narrative inherent in the book
becomes fully apparent. Lorca integrated his thematic
messages very closely into the structure of the poems
themselves, and an analysis of this sort will yield the
discovery of a new dynamism and coherence in the work
which has been overlooked until now.

Three major themes permeate Lorca’s New York poetry:
love, oppression, and death. It is difficult, if not
impossible, to separate these themes from the poet’s
descriptions of, and reactions to, the American
metropolis. These three themes are the same ones which
appear generally in all of his artistic creation, be it
his early poetry or his later dramas. Contrary to the
opinions of many critics who viewed Poete en Nuevg_York
more as an aberration in the corpus of Lorca’s work, the
thematic content of the work is extremely similar to
earlier and later writings. Calls for liberation and
protests against blind authority are as strongly voiced in
Poete en NuengYork as they are in Libroggggpoeggg and

Romancero giteno. The search for love is important in the

 

New York poetry as well as the rural dramas written later.

79

80

Betty Jean Craige writes:

Poet in New York is a poetry of anguish and
outrage, a poetry of the solitary individual
isolated within a chaotic, hostile universe with
which he has no communication. The apparently
surrealistic imagery expresses a very different
world from the Andalucie of Libro de poemgg: yet
the poetry reveals an attitude toward the world
that is not, finally, radically different from
that of Lorca's early twenties. The poet who

(. . .) yearns for his innocence forever gone is the
same poet who raises his cry against the modern
dehumanized civilization of New York (1).

Even the poet's own brother Francisco saw little
difference between Lorca’s earlier works and Poete en
Nuevg_York (2). Many Lorca scholars confused his
innovative language and imagery, which Lorca drew from the
discoveries and poetic explorations of the European
surrealists, with his extremely coherent and definitely
non-surrealist perceptions of life in a modern industrial
society.

In his article entitled, "On the Relation of

'9

Analytical Psychology to Poetry, Carl Jung describes a

vital link which exists between the poet, his "message,"
and the reader:

That is the secret of great art, and of its
effect upon us. The creative process, so far as
we are able to follow it at all, consists in the
unconscious activation of an archetypal image,
and in elaborating and shaping this image into
the finished work. By giving it shape, the
artist translates it into the language of the
present, and so makes it possible for us to find
our way back to the deepest springs of life.
Therein lies the social significance of art: it
is constantly at work educating the spirit of
the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age
is most lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of
the artist reaches back to the primordial image

81

in the unconscious which is best fitted to
compensate the inadequacy: the one—sidedness of
the present. The artist seizes on the image,
and in raising it from deepest unconsciousness
he brings it into relation with conscious
values, thereby transforming it until it can be
accepted by the minds of his contemporaries
according to their powers (3).

Poetg_en Nueva York is a collection of socially

 

significant poems which, employing Jung's useful
terminology, educates the reader. Lorca's major themes
are not in themselves innovative ones. Death,
oppression, and love have been the subjects of works of
art for centuries: but the techniques which Lorca employs
in the poems are themselves innovative. They capture the
spirit of the twentieth century existentialist—non—
believer in his/her search for fundamental meaning in
life. Basic questions, and the search for their solutions
have not changed markedly through the ages, but what has
changed is humankind's position in the world relative to
scientific progress. Lorca may have sensed all of this,
for his poetry exudes a type of spiritual unfulfillment.

A melancholy yearning for peace and justice are evident in
the poems, interwoven into the frenetic imagery of the
book itself. Juan Cano Ballesta describes some of the
more negative phenomena to which Garcia Lorca was witness
in New York City in 1929-1930. Among them, he mentions
the stock market crash of 1929, the tremendous amount of
unemployment which was the result of that crash, and the

ruthlessness of the elite class which controlled the

82

country by virtue of their wealth (4).

The frenetic state of affairs which Lorca encountered
in New York was far different from that to which he was
accustomed. He had previously lived in a large city, of
course, but even Madrid during the early part of the
twentieth century had not in any way prepared him for the
lack of human value, and the frenzied lifestyle of the
American scene. In "Paiseje de la multitud que orina
(Nocturno de Battery Place)," Garcia Lorca communicates
some of his vision, which clashed so much with life as he
had known it in his homeland:

iLe lune! Los policies iLas sirenas de los

trasetlenticos!

Fachadas de orin, de humo, anemones guantes de goma:

Todo esta roto por la noche

abierta de piernas sobre lee terrazas

Todo esta roto por los tibios caﬁos

de una terrible fuente silenciosa (56).
This list of bleak images of the modern city, the sirens,
smoke, and rubber gloves are followed by the image of
night in the city which stands with "legs apart," a
reference in this case to the act of urinating, which is
seen in the last strophe as a terrible silent fountain.
The bleakness of the metropolis, captured in this
nocturnal view of Battery Place by Lorca, is made all the
more stark through the metaphor of urination.

In a later poem, "Nueva York: Oficina y denuncio,"
Lorca appears to be more in control of his emotions as he

describes his surroundings:

Un rio que viene cantando

83

por los dormitories de los arrabales,

y es plate, cemento o brisa en el alba mentide de New—

York.

Existen 1as montaﬁas. Le sé.

Y los anteejes para la sabiduria.

Lo sé. Pero yo no he venido para ver el cielo.

He venido para ver la turbia sangre,

la sengre que lleva las maquinas a las catarates

y el espiritu e la lengua de la cobra.

Todos los dies se matan en New-York cuatro millones de

patos,

cinco millones de cerdos,

dos mil palemes para el gusto de los agenizantes,

Un millen de vecas,

un millon de cerderos

y dos millones de galles

que dejen los cielos hechos aﬁicos (104).
His denunciation of New York here leads the reader to
believe that Lorca feels "bigger" than his surroundings,
and new no longer intimidated by them as he had been in
the beginning of the work. He lists the depressing
statistics, one by one, which he believes have upset the
equilibrium of Nature, and his own personal equilibrium as
well. Then the mountains of Andalucie come to mind, and
cause him to remember his previous existence and another
way of life. "Anteojos de sabiduria," instilled in the
poet in another land, and carried within, new surface to
help him deal rationally with the modern city. That
tranquility which Lorca carries inside is a recourse which
enables him to apprehend the urban metropolis, "tame the
beast,” so to speak, and then to condemn it in no
uncertain terms in "New York: Oficina y denuncio," a poem
which appears toward the end of the composition.

If the New York poems are analyzed from a personal,

psychological, or biographical perspective, a task

84

undertaken by many critics in the past, (5) the result is
a prolific harvest of highly specialized facts. But it
should be noted that Poetg en Nuevg York does not belong
exclusively to the poet, but rather to its readers, and
the environment from which Lorca drew his inspiration. To
analyze the book exclusively in terms of Garcia Lorca’s
biography is to overlook the fact that the composition
was the result of a variety of sources and influences.
While it is true that Lorca's psyche played an important
part in the creation of the work, it would be a grave
error to overlook the environment which contributed as
well. Arnold Hauser offers some valuable insights into
the production of works of art. He does not minimize the
contribution of the author him/herself, but neither does
he minimize the contributions of the society in which the
work is produced:

The inadequacy, however, that we often find in
the socielegist's view of art is not simply the
result of the method of research which sociology
shares with psychology and art history. It is
also owing to the rather undeveloped language
applied by the sociologist to the subtly
differentiated world of art, a language vastly
inferior to the far more refined appropriate
language of the psychologist and the art
historian. The concepts with which the
sociologist works are woefully inadequate for
dealing with the wealth and subtlety of artistic
production. Categories such as "courtly,"
"bourgeois," “capitalistic," "urban,"
"conservative," and ”liberal" are too narrow and
schematic and also too rigid to do justice to
the special character of a work of art. Each
category comprehends such a variety of artistic
views and aims that it does not tell us much
that is really relevant. What do we really know
about the artistic problems with which

85

Michelangelo had to wrestle, about the
individuality of his means and methods, when we
have noted merely that he was contemporary with
the formulas of the Council of Trent, the new
political realism, the birth of modern
capitalism and absolutism? When we know all
this, we perhaps understand better his restless
spirit, the turn that his art took in the
direction of mannerism, possibly even in some
measure the astounding inarticulateness of his
last works. His greatness and the incomparable
quality of his aims are no more explained this
way than Rembrandt's genius is to be explained
by the economic and social conditions that were
at once the foundation of his artistic career
and his undoing. Here we come up against the
definite limits of sociological inquiry (6).
In order to more productively consider Lorca's Poete en
Nuevg_York, it will be helpful to bear Hauser's words in
mind. The artist, or poet in this case, is a product of
his/her environment: he/she does not create the thematic
concerns in the poetry, but rather, reappraises reality in
such a way as to make it more comprehensible and
communicable, and then delivers a textugl pgoduct, based
upon his/her observations and creativity.

Poete en Nuevngork constitutes a sophisticated
challenge taken on by Lorca to portray some extremely
negative aspects and practices of an industrial society.
Lorca in one sense is holding up a mirror to the American
society, and other societies caught up in the
technological/industrial machine, and his portrayal is not
complimentary. The poetry in a way is a plea issued to
industrial societies to "mend their ways,” and to correct

some of the glaring social ills which are inherent in the

system. Lorca’s concern for the oppressed "underdogs"

86

trapped in the least desirable positions in the urban
industrial machine permeates the New York poetry. His cry
of protest against the lust for power, and blind
materialism is as evident in this work as it is in earlier
works, and in the dramas written subsequently. It is
widely accepted that the gypsies of Andalucie in Romgncero
gitano served as a prototypical group for Lorca's more
general protests against the domination of a majority. In
the New York poetry, he transferred this image of the
oppressed minority onto Blacks, homosexuals, and children.
These three groups stand out as the three most oppressed
by the American metropolis, and a discussion of this
thematic constant is helpful before undertaking an
analysis of the narrative structure of the work.

Lorca's New York poetry demonstrates an intuitive
identification with the blacks of New York, largely
concentrated demographically in Harlem. His poem, "El rey
de Harlem" is an eloquent encomium to the black race, and
at the same time a rather mournful condemnation of their
plight in America. This sentiment is seen most
explicitly in the following verses from "El rey de

Harlem,’ a poem inspired by Lorca's visit to a Harlem
night club, where the subservient blacks waited on the
whites as the whites took advantage of the jazz music and
other cultural contributions of the black heritage:

iAy Harlem! iAy Harlem! iAy Harlem!

No hay angustia comparable a tus ojos oprimidos,
a tu sangre estremecida dentro del eclipse obsuro,

87

a tu violencia granate, sordo—muda en la penumbra,
a tu gran rey prisionero, con un traje de conserje
(36).

It is well known that Harlem, during the 1920' and the
1930’s underwent a cultural re—birth (the "Harlem
Renaissance") due to the influx of many whites attracted
by jazz music and African dance forms, who filled the
Harlem night clubs night after night for years. In a
sense, it was another form of exploitation visited on the
black race, who catered to the wealthy white visitors in
the most menial of jobs such as cooks, busboys, and maids.
The "conserje" depicted in this poem was representative of
a large number of poor black southerners who had
immigrated to New York during the two decades prior to the
writing of the poetry (7). The "conserje" of the poem is
remarkably similar to the blacks described in the
following observations of Harold Brown, in his article
entitled, "The Demand for Black Labor:"

This initial process [of Blacks becoming
established directly into the urban industrial
economy] was to form the matrix into which the
ever-increasing numbers of Black workers were to
be fitted. As the size of the Black population
of the big cities grew, "Negro jobs" became
roughly institutionalized into an identifiable
black sub-labor market within the larger
metropolitan labor market. The culture of
control that was embodied in the regulative
systems which managed the black ghettes,
morover, provided an effective, though less-
rigid, variation of the Jim Crow segregation
that continued with hardly any changes in the
south. . . At the same time, the variation of
Jim Crow that existed in the north was more than
simply a carry-over from the agrarian south.
These ghetto controls served the class function
for industrial society of politically and

88

socially setting off that section of the
proletariat that was consigned to the least-
desirable employment. This racial walling off
not only was accomplished by direct ruling—class
actions, but also was mediated through an
escalating reciprocal process in which the
hostility and competition of the white working
class was stimulated by the growth of the black
proletariat and in return operated as an agent
in shaping the new racial controls (8).

As has already been mentioned, Garcia Lorca was not only
concerned with the plight of this oppressed minority
trapped in the lowest echelons of the capitalist society,
but also with the plight of a people losing their own
identity—~a people who had been violently removed from
their primordial roots in a more pristine existence in
Africa. This portrayal is immediately reminiscent of the

gypsies of Romancero gjtano, who were not only victims of

 

an alien European authoritarianism, but were also a
drifting race of people, cut off from their native roots,
and helpless to retain their native cultural traits, in
spite of their struggles to do so. In New York, Garcia
Lorca saw that the Blacks were forced to sacrifice their
own cultural values and practices out of an economic
necessity to survive in the modern industrial metropolis.
Richard Saez writes:
He felt that they [the Negro population of New
York City] were closer, through their ancestral
heritage, to the primal and eternal laws of the
universe from which the metropolitan Waste Land
has severed the multitudes and with which the
poet has also lost contact (9).

The repressiveness of the American mechanized society

was sensed by Garcia Lorca in a variety of ways. It

89

should be remembered that he identified with the Black
minority not because he experienced the effects of racial
discrimination and social domination, but rather, because
he sympathized strongly with another minority shunned by
the "establishment"~— homosexuals. Miguel Aguirre, while
not mentioning the homosexual implications specifically,
alludes to Garcia Lorca's sympathies toward all minorities
forced to live in the "margin of society:“
El sustentivo ’gitano' (0 el adjetivo) tiene,
dentro de la poesia de Lorca, claros
significados anti—sociales. El gitano (como el
contrabandista, como el negro de Poetgjen Nuevg
York) es el hombre viviendo fuera de la
socieded, es tembién el hombre primitivo, la
fuerza elemental de la naturaleza, existiendo a1
margen de las leyes y convenciones sociales. . .
Esta es la tragedia, porque él no puede, como el
gitano, prescindir de la sociedad que le rodea
(10).
Another dimension of Poetg_en Nuevg_York emerges during a
careful reading of the work-~the theme of homosexual love.
This aspect of Garcia Lorca's personal life has been
recently documented in some detail (11), but few analyses
of the work itself have given the theme thorough
attention.

Until just a few years ago, the topic of
homosexuality was either suppressed or avoided by the
literary critics. During the last fifteeen years, as the
social mores and taboos have changed, increasing numbers
of critics have begun to examine this aspect of the New

York poetry, but much work remains to be done due to its

exclusion as a topic of analysis for so many decades.

90

The mournful and tragic tone of of much of Garcia
Lorca's poetry—~that written earlier, as well as Poete en

Nueva York——reflects a yearning, and a search for

 

fulfillment. Many of his early poems cast women in the
role of the unfulfilled lover, or the tragic wife or
widow, and it has been speculated by some critics that
Lorca's affinity with these women can be explained by the
fact that he too experienced the same kinds of rejections
or desertions at the hands of men (12). José Ortega
offers several interesting insights on this topic:

En la fijacion del carécter de la personalidad
ejerce una gran influencia el medio social.
Lorca, come cualquier espaﬁol desde los Reyes
Catolicos a nuestros dies, vive la represion
internalizeda del superego o moral social que ha
estigmatizado y difamado lo homosexual, es
decir, el placer de los sentidos, alienacion
sexual que en Espaﬁa se traduce en represion en
pro de fines socioreligiosos de la minoria en el
poder. Esta patelogia social altera la
manifestacion de toda actividad sexual,
especialmente la de caracter homosexual y
explica, parcialmente, la explosion erotica en
la obra de Lorca come aspiracién a1 amor libre
de toda traba (13).

This "sublimation" of the homosexual impulse on the part
of the poet is a question open to debate. In Poeta en

Nuevg York, both praise and condemnation of homosexuals

 

may be found. It might be said, by way of clarification,
that the work is a continuum, or process (which follows a
structural narrative), in which the first reference to
homosexuals is extremely negative, but that this
negativism fades as the work progresses. This first

reference to homosexuals is as follows:

91

Qué no baile e1 Papa, ni e1 rey. . .
ni los sodomitas. . . (p. 50).

The list of those receiving condemnation in the poem
”Danza de la muerte" includes the "sodomitas." a Biblical
reference to homosexuals. The Biblical reference
automatically denotes condemnation, and thus, the tone
taken toward these homosexuals is negative. It should be
noted however, that "Danza de la muerte" is a poem
narrated in the third person. Later references to
homosexuals, or homosexual love, will be made in the first
person, and in a much more supportive fashion (Lorca’s
subdivision of the homosexual minority into "good" amd
"evil" camps is discussed in more detail below). Later in
the work, Lorca's reference to a "dark love" which he
desires to be able to express has been interpreted by
Richard Predmore (14) as a homosexual call for liberation
from the shackles imposed by society:

Pero no quiero mundo ni sueﬁo vez divine

quiero mi libertad, mi amor humano

en el rincon mas oscuro de la brisa que nedie quiere

3M1 amor humano! (72)
Predmore views these verses as a direct reference to
Lorca's demand for freedom from restrictions placed on the
homosexual by the heterosexual majority. He makes the
connection between the "amor oscuro” of Lorca's recently—
discovered sonnets of the same title, and the "rincon mas
oscuro" in the lines above. Predmore further points out
that the female figure in the New York poetry all but

vanishes—~much in contrast to her position of dominance in

92

his earlier poetry~—and he believes that this is a
significant indicator of Lorca's shift toward more
openness on the subject of homosexuality (15).

The much analyzed, and often cited "Oda a Walt
Whitman" contains some of Lorca’s most explicit defenses
of homosexuality. He writes:

Por see no levanto mi vez, viejo Walt Whitman,

contra el niﬁo que escribe

nombre de niﬁa en su elmohada:

ni contra el muchacho que se viste de novia

en la oscuridad del ropero:

ni contra los solitarios de los casinos

que beben con asco el agua de la prostitucion:

ni contra los hombres de mirada verde

que amen al hombre y que queman sus labios en

silencio.

Fare 81 contra vosotros, maricas de las ciudades

de carne tumefacta y pensamiento inmundo (124).
There is a quality here of pity and of sympathy towards
the homosexuals who bear the tremendous burden of
suffering in their solitary worlds, condemned by the
members of the dominant society. But, on the other hand,
Lorca has only condemnation for the type of homosexual who
flaunts his differences and who increases perceptions in
the general population that homosexuality is a sexual
"perversity" or dysfunction. Some of the strongest
condemnatory language found in the entire work is directed
at the ”fairies" of the world, who seek to satisfy their
cravings at any cost, and who refuse to see any of the

transcendence of real love in human existence. He writes:

Madres de lodo. Arpias. Enemigos sin sueﬁo
del amor que reparte coronas de alegria.

Contra vosotros siempre, que dais a los muchachos

93

gotas de sucia muerte con amargo veneno.
Contra vosotros siempre,

"Faeries" de Norteamérica,

"Pajaros" de la Habana,

"Jotos" de Méjico,

"Sareses" de Cadiz,

"Apios" de Sevilla,

"Cancos" de Madrid,

"Flores" de Alicante,

"Adelaidas" de Portugal (124).

This dichotomy in Lorca's views towards homosexuals, as

seen in various poems of Poete en Nueva York has puzzled

 

some critics, for they tend to focus on Lorca's
condemnation of homosexuals in general, and to overlook
the fact that he was in reality, condemning only a portion
of this minority.

Gil de Biedma claims that this dichotomy or ambiguity
in Lorca’s poetry concerning homosexuals is explained by
an "inner" dichotomy or struggle which Lorca experienced
as a result of his inability to reconcile his own
homosexuality within himself:

Question: Lorca does't accept what he is. . .

De Biedma: The proof that he doesn't is the fact that
one of his central themes is the barrenness of love: in
Lorca's vision, which is a completely procreative,
rural, peasant vision, if you will, a sterile love, a
love which doesn’t fertilize and reproduce, is
accursed. The choice of the theme of Yerma (Barren)
was no doubt a symbol of this obsession of his. I'm
not familiar with his gay drama El publice (The
Public), but I imagine that the theme of barren love
and its close association with death should appear
there also.

Question: From what's known of The Public, one would
get the impression that there, at last, Lorca was
beginning to write gay poetry as such.

De Biedma: I don't know, because one of the
alternative titles he gave to The Public was Lg
gggtruccién de Sodemg (The Destruction of Sodom).

The rural landowner mentality is very marked in Lorca
(16).

 

94

De Biedma's opinions are informative, yet perhaps just a
little too restrictive in their scope. While it is true
that a condemnation of homosexual promiscuity is very
marked in Lorca's poetry, particularly in Poete en Nueva
lggg, the poetry is in no way condemnatory of homosexuals
as a minority group.

Lorca's poetic explorations into some of the most
obscure and ambiguous sexual reservoirs of the human
psyche involved much more than a scant consideration of
homosexuals in Poetggen Nuevg_York. His poetry
intuitively links the theme of homosexuality, and
sexuality in general, with the themes of lost innocence,
childhood, and perhaps most importantly, with the
domination by a majority of a minority, together with the
repression and intolerance usually to be found in that
classic power relationship.

The Blacks of New York, the frail and sickly children
of the city, and the homosexual became a closely linked
tried in the New York poetry. An examination of this
relationship serves to clarify some of the more enigmatic
aspects of the poems.

The anguished tenor of the New York poems is at times
interrupted by a fiery and rebellious call for freedom.

0

"Quiero mi amor humane," and 'iYo denuncio!" are phrases
which from time to time punctuate the text, and lend to it

an inner tension founded on rebellion, and, paradoxically,

95

later in the text, an aura of inner peace or tranquility
which is found only in defiance and inner strength and
self—knowledge. An overwhelming number of the poems are
written in the first person, and for this reason, one
cannot entirely overlook the psychological personal
elements to found throughout the text. Carl Jung gives an
elaborate description of the many disillusions that the
"normal" human experiences when passing from childhood
into adulthood, and this, in turn, helps in analyzing the
nostalgic, personal tones of many of Lorca's New York
poems:

We are all thoroughly familiar with the sources
of the problems which arise in the period of our
youth. For most people it is the demands of
life which harshly put an end to the dream of
childhood. If the individual is sufficiently
well—prepared, the transition to a professional
career may take place smoothly. But if he
clings to illusions that contradict reality,
then problems will surely arise. No one takes
the step into life without making certain
presuppositions—-and occasionally they are
false. That is, they may not fit the conditions
into which one is thrown. It is often a
question of exaggerated expectations, of under—
estimation of difficulties, of unjustified
optimism or of a negative attitude. One could
compile quite a list of the false
presuppositions which gave rise to the earliest,
conscious problems (17).

Garcia Lorca’s poetry often contains strains which reflect
this most human of predicaments. In Poete en Nuevg_York
as well as in much of his earlier poetry, numerous
examples of despair may be discerned, particularly when
the poetry deals with the human dilemma of one who passes

from the protected and innocent life of a child into the

96
much more complex and harsh reality of the adult. Ian
Gibson comments upon this aspect of Lorca’s poetry in

relation to his Balada triste, but his remarks are just as

 

appplicable, if not more so, to PNY.
The central theme of Balada triste . . . is not
so much that of nostalgia for lost childhood in
itself as for the sexual innocence implicit in
the condition of childhood and new irretrievably
lost. The poet seeks to capture the flavor of
the ”dies ya lejanas" when he had not yet been
confronted by his own sexuality, the early days
before the roses and carnations of heterosexual
passion had withered at the frigid touch of the
iris, symbol of a morbid sexuality that he now
recognizes within himself and which he finds
himself unable to accept (18).
Lorca’s preoccupation with an innocent, untroubled, and
more pristine past reflects a yearning for youth and the
pre~pubescent life. In ”Tu infancie en Menton,” just such
a yearning is articulated. Here, the poet evokes images
of innocence and contentment, and days spent on the French
Riviera. He details his memories, some of which are not
all that pleasant, in such a way as to make all of them
joyful. The reality which the poet perceived at that time
in his life—-even that part of the reality which was not
terribly pleasant, was still innocuous and unthreatening,
since he did not possess the awareness or the faculties of
an adult which might have enabled him to interpret them
in a more cynical fashion.
Garcia Lorca's poetry exhibits an almost unrestrained

horror of the dead or deformed child. In "Vuelta de

paseo," his naming of the child "with the egg—white face"

97

conjures in his readers the face of a child in very poor
health (The link is made between city life and ill—
health.)(p. 23). In "El niﬁo Stanton," the little boy
whose question "Do you like me?" is answered unequivocably
and enthusiastically, "Yes, yes," is threatened in the
poetry by unseen menaces even as he peacefully sleeps.
The "Niﬁa ahogada en un pozo (Granada y Newburgh)" who has
fallen into a well, faces one of the most dismal and
tragic deaths conceivable-—the water in the well into
which she has drowned is stationary, since naturally it is
trapped and does not flow, and will never give up the
cadaver to the grieving family, as a river, for example,
would in due course. This is the water "que no desemboca"
(p. 83). The image is doubly forceful since death is
itself the final "static" stage of life. The children of
Lorca's poetry are a group surrounded by a world replete
with phantasmagoric and ill defined terrors and evils.
Their potential for fulfillment and happiness in these
poems is bleak, and their existence is portrayed by the
poet as a nightmarish process of maturation which leads
inevitably to oblivion. The terrors which menace a child
such as Stanton lurk at the end of the chilhood process,
when the child reaches the stage of sexual awareness and
activity. The following verses convey this threat to the
innocence of the childhood state:

Tu ignorancia es un monte de leones, Stanton.

El die que el cancer te die una paliza
y te escupio en el dormitorio donde murieron los

98

huéspedes en la epidemia

y abrié su quebrada rose de vidrios secos y manos
blandas

para salpicar de lode 1as pupilas de los que navegan,

t6 buscaste en la hierba mi agonia,

mi agonia con flores de terror,

mientras que el agrio cencer mudo que quiere acostarse
contigo

pulverizaba rojos paisajes por 1as sabanas de amargura

y ponia sobre los ataudes

helados arbolitos de ecido borico (p. 78).

Stanton's naiveté is depicted as a "mountain of lions,"
and as a "fountain of strength." The infirmity of the
sexual condition is highlighted by the use of imagery that
would traditionally not be associated with the sexual act,
such as the cancer "which wants to go to sleep with you."
These images, combined with those of death and malaise——
the cancer, the epidemic, and coffins, convey an ambiance
of death and sexual illness, of which, in his innocence,
Stanton is not aware. This rather bleak and distressing
portrayal by Lorca of the childhood condition can be
explained in part by some of the observations of Philip
Rieff, who draws upon Freudian concepts of innate
sexuality in the child to certain societal practices:
To preserve its moral doctrine of the free and
adult men, society has created a sentimental
doctrine of the free and asexual child. It was
Freud's insight that the complex urges of
sexuality are not born in the adult but are
already present in childhood: in fact, the
character of the adult is shaped by the specific
erotic development of the child, just as, Freud
believed, the character of modern culture
derives from these open possibilities permitted
in ”primitive states of society and early
periods of history." This formulates a plea for

tolerance of the child, for an end of maiming
threats, for a new sympathy and indulgence (19).

99

The New York poems treat children with enormous sympathy,
forboding, and respect. The state of childhood innocence
is portrayed with tenderness and even nostalgia in the
poems, but it is a fragile state threatened at the same
time by the society in which the children live, and in
which they mature. For Lorca, the modern industrial
society is a paramount threat to the condition of
childhood freedom and innocence. With a remarkable
intuition which will be discussed later, he linked the
child, the Black, and the homosexual (an extremely
unlikely tried, at first consideration) into a cohesive
and related group, all menaced by the oppressiveness and
destruction of the modern industrial metropolis.

As already discussed, the Black race in the New York
poems is a completely dominated, or colonized people.
Their culture is not their own, and they are forced into
subservient posts in the capitalist economic structure of
New York City. The homosexual, as portrayed in the
poetry, is a person with a sexual preference not of his
asking, but certainly a very integral part of his
character. For Lorca, the homosexual was as incapable of
changing his sexual preference as the Black was of
changing his color. The child, who formed the third apex
in the mind of the poet, was thrust into a world of
staggering repressions and responsibilities, no more a
willing victim of his circumstances than the Black or the

homosexual. These three minorities, then, share a

100

relationship in the New York poetry, and are fused into an
ambiguous, but homogenous group. It is significant that
the herald and the "savior" of the human race from
mechanized society at the end of "Ode a Walt Whitmann" is
a little Black child, whose tassel of corn represents the
rebirth of a humanity with roots tied to the earth: the
oppressed, as well as the oppressors of the modern
metropolis with their dehumanized values, have disappeared
by the time the Black child appears. It should be noted,
though, that this child is the herald in a poem which
deals largely with the theme of homosexuality. This
"reino de la espiga" mentioned at the end of the poem is a
clear reference to a return to primordial values, where
social morés and etiquette, repressions and taboos had not
yet emerged. The Black—homosexual—child linkage is an
unexpected one, but not one which has gone completely
uncommented by the critics. Leslie Fiedler offers some
extremely valuable insights into this relationship when he
posits that it has practically always been present in
several well-known and widely read American novels:
What, then, do all these books have in common?
As boys' books, we should expect them shyly,
guiltlessly as it were to proffer a chaste male
love as the ultimate emotional experience——end
this is spectacularly the case. In Dana, it is
the narrator's melacholy love for the kanaka,
Hope: in Cooper, the lifelong affection of Natty
Bumppo and Chingachgook: in Melville, Ishmael's
love for Queequeg: in Twain, Huck's feelings for
Nigger Jim. At the focus of emotion, where we
are accustomed to find in the world's great

novels some heterosexual passion, be it
"platonic" love or adultery, seduction, rape, or

lOl

long-drawn-out flirtation, we come instead on
the fugitive slave and the no—account boy lying
side by side on a raft borne by the endless
river toward an impossible escape, or the pariah
sailor walking in the tattooed arms of the brown
harpooner on the verge of their impossible
quest. "Aloha, aikgneL aloha nui," Hope cries to
the lover who prefers him to all his fellow
whites; and Ishmael in utter frankness tells us:
"I found Queequag's arm thrown over me in the
most loving and affectionate manner. You had
almost thought I had been his wife. . . he still
hugged me tightly, as though naught but death
should part us twain. . . Thus, then, in our
heart's honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg-—a cozy,
loving pair. . . he pressed his forehead against
mine, clasped me around the waist, and said that
henceforth we were married (20)."

 

Fiedler's polemical point has often been overlooked. Yet
he demonstrates, rather convincingly, that in many of
America's most popular and oft—read novels there exists an
archtypal relationship between the ”colored man” and the
white man, and furthermore, that at times, this white man
is still in his adolescence. The Deerslayer and Moby Dick

are examples of the former, and Huckleberrijinn is an

 

example of the letter.
More importantly for the parameters of this thematic
study, Fiedler even cites the linkage of the Blacks with

homosexuals that Lorca made in Poetggen Nuevngork:

 

Unwittingly, we are possessed in childhood by
these characters and their indiscriminated
meaning, and it is difficult for us to
dissociate them without a sense of belief.
Whet--these household figures clues to our
subtlest passions! The foreigner finds it
easier to perceive the significances too deep
within us to be brought into focus. D. H.
Lawrence discovered in our classics a linked
mythos of escape and immaculate male love:
Lorca in The Poet In New York grasped
instinctively (he could not even read English)

 

102

the kinship of Harlem and Walt Whitman, the
fairy as Bard. But of course we do not have to
be conscious of what possesses us: in every
generation of our own writers the archtype
reappears, refracted, half—understood, but
there (21).

It is necessary to view this important linkage in a wider

context. Lorca's concerns with the themes of love and

death must be viewed in the context of his wider protest

against repression, destruction, and domination. Poete en

NueVggYork is a work of, among other things, social

 

protest. It is a condemnation of a society which values
money over human fulfillment, and conformity over
individual freedom and expression. While he has focused
on certain minorities to make his point, his concerns are
universal in scope. He uses the minorities,
representatives of the weak and the powerless, to bring
home his major point, that modern industrial and
regimented life, particulary that which is to found
encountered in the urban metropolis, is degrading, life-
threatening, and almost devoid of any redeeming qualities.
Henry Cohen writes:
Here, Garcia Lorca clearly lays the blame for
the pandemonic chaos of the city to the
capitalists whom he seems to view vaguely as
having created, or at least as having furnished,
the conditions under which the urban monster
evolved. . . . The monstrous city becomes a
character in itself, standing synecdochically
for the nation, and by implicit extension, for
all of Western industrial civilization (22).

Lorca condemns the false illusions which money and power

engender, and decries the general loss of human value

103
which he attributes to the frenetic life of the city. In

"New York (Oficina y denuncio),' this condemnation can be
plainly seen:

Yo denuncio a toda la gente,

que ignore la otra mitad,

la mitad irredimible

que levanta sus montes de cemento

donde laten los corazones

de los animalitos que se olviden

y donde caeremos todos

en la ﬁltima fiesta de los taladros.

Os escupo en la care.

La otra mitad me escucha

devorando, orinando, volando, en su pureza

come los niﬁos de las porterias

que llevan frégiles palitos

a los huecos donde se oxidan

las antenas de los insectos (p. 106)

In Poetg_en NuevggYork, Garcia Lorca clearly
perceives the dynamism of the American metropolis. This
poetry transforms the city into a living protagonist in
itself, and Lorca's views of the city are far from
laudatory. There have been a myriad of poets who have
sung the praises of the modern metropolis: its cultural,
aesthetic, and economic opportunities have been recognized
in literature for hundreds of years. Lorca was far too
perceptive not to be aware of all of these positive
aspects of the largest American city, and yet, he chose to
focus only on its negative characteristics. Perhaps his
motivation for this can be discerned in the following

commentary, which he offered in an interview shortly after

his return from the New World:

Mi observaciOn [de Nueva York] he de ser, pues,

104
lirica. Arquitectura extrahumana y ritmo
furioso, geometria y angustia. Sin embargo, no
hay alegria. pese al ritmo. Hombre y maquina
viven la esclavitud del memento. Las aristas
suben al cielo sin voluntad de nube ni voluntad
de gloria. Nada mas poético y terrible que la
lucha de los rascacielos con el cielo que 1as
cubre (23).
Lorca's concerns in the New York poetry were much more
than a facile appraisal of the modern American city. He
was an "on~the—scene" witness to the people who were
frantically "pursuing happiness and fulfillment" in the
night clubs of Harlem or the ticker—tape refuse of Wall
Street. He realized that even those who were succeeding
in the urban center were doing so at the expense of their
fellows, and also at the expense of their own
"humanities." The “mass man" rises like an unhealthy
specter at strategic junctures in the poems—~the man who,
while striving to transform himself into a useful and
comfortable ”cog" in the industrial/technological machine,
is, in effect, hopelessly cutting himself off from the
sources of a more profound and rewarding lifestyle.
Contentment and tranquility have more to do in Lorca’s
poetry with the rejection of the modern industrial machine
then with any attempts made to somehow fit harmoniously
into its functions. His concern for the man who loses
himself in the frenetic life—style of the city can be
further explored by considering the following observations

of Herbert Marcuse:

As René Dubois has said, the need for "quiet,
privacy, independence, initiative, and some open

105
space" are not "frills or luxuries, but
constitute real biological necessities" Their
lack injures the instinctual structure itself.
Freud has emphasized the "asocial" character of
Eros-~the mass society achieves an
"oversocialization" to which the individual
reacts "with all sorts of frustrations,
repressions, aggressions, and fears which soon
develop into genuine neuroses (24).

A thorough appraisal of the thematic concerns of
Lorca's New York poetry uncovers a rich thematic web. In
certain ways, Lorca was ahead of his time, for he seems to
have intuited that the problems which he saw in the
metropolis over fifty years ago were not likely to
improve. He was even out of step with his avant-garde
contemporaries, many of whom lauded modern industrial
technology. He seems to have been suspicious of any
ideology or political system which exhibited signs of
oppression. This included the capitalist system, and
possibly even the Marxist system which his fellow poets
and countrymen Rafael Alberti and Miguel Hernandez, among
others, supported (25). Perhaps his world view was more
ample. The melancholy and the horror, and the warnings
which permeate the New York poems predate the predicaments
of twentieth century humankind. Lorca offers little hope
to those who would attempt to tame the industrial monster
through the application of one ideology or another.
Rather, the poems seem to reflect Lorca's conviction that
modern man had "lost his way," and that, rather than

simply acquiescing to the dynamism of the technological

dialectic, humans should search for their true value, and

106
for a more profound and happy salvation in the primordial
and much "closer to the earth" beginnings of the species.
Miguel Garcia Posada expands on this idea:

La esquemética interpretacion del pensamiento
marxiste, precticeda incluso per poetas
coeténeos de Lorca, altos poetas (Alberti o
Hernandez), es rechazada per nuestro autor,
quien concede una importancia capital e1
concepto de alienacion y a la asuncion, por
parte de los oprimidos, de papeles y funciones
de los opresores. La denuncia social se combine,
a veces en los mismos poemas, con la reflexion
ontologica, la meditacion de signo metafisico,
teﬁida en buena parte de un pesimismo
irreversible sobre el destino trégico del
hombre. Seria unilateral, parcial, considerar
estos poemas solo desde el engulo social y
politico: tenemos la obligacion de acepter a los
escritores come son, no come quisiéramos que
fuesen. Lorca esta muy lejos del optimismo
revolucionario de los aﬁos 3O porque su
concepcion total del hombre dista de haber
eliminado los grandee enigmas de la condicion
humane—~y no es cuestion, insisto, de discutir o
rechazar 1as creencias del discurso poético——
(26).

The revolutionary optimism to which Garcia Posada refers
is not as thoroughly lacking in the New York poetry as he
portrays it. Garcia Lorca wrote poetry of rebellion and
confrontation—~his "denunciation" of the city is evidence
enough of this. But in an important sense, he was
optimistic as well. The young Black child in the "Ode a
Walt Whitman" who heralds in the "reino de la espiga" is
certainly a powerful symbol of mankind's potential return
to his "roots" and fundamental value, once the polluted
world of the metropolis has faded away. But that
occurrence remained but a vision for Lorca, for he knew

that the time of perdition, destruction, and purification

107
had to arrive before his child could arise. Garcia Posada
is correct in portraying Lorca's vision as pessimistic, in
that the destruction of modern society is a necessary
prerequisite of the new re—birth, but Posade missed the
optimism of that "new world" which was to come, in which
humans alligned themselves once again with the harmonious
flow of nature, as they had done in primitive times.
Lorca singled out the discrimination and mistreatment of
blacks, children, and homosexuals in the end, in order to
portray their suffering to the modern industrial society
which, he apparently believed, bore a great deal of
responsibility for their plight. More importantly, he
warned against a continuation down the same oppressive
path. He cautioned that the ever growing and mutating
industrial monster was very likely to one day turn upon
its creators, and to place them , the "oppressors," in the

unexpected role of the "oppressed."

NOTES

1. Betty Jean Craige, Lorca’s 'Poeta en Nuevg York:'

The Fall Into Consciouggggg (Lexington: University Press

 

of Kentucky, 1977), p. 10.
2. Joseph W. Zdenek, "Poetg_en Nuegngork: Product
of Garcia Lorca's Subconsciousness or Superconsciousness?"

Garcig Lorca Review, X, No 2 (Spring 1982): 69.

 

3. Carl Gustav Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical

Psychology to Poetry," in The Portgble Jung, Joseph

 

Cambell, ed. (New York: The Viking Press, 1971), pp.
321-22.

4. Furthermore, Cano Ballesta links Lorca's poetic
expression with Marxist terminology: "Ha presenciado el
hundimiento de la Bolsa de Nueva York y esta comenzando a
ver sus efectos en 1as grandee mases de parades. En estas
chocantes enumeraciones asocia objetos e ideas dispares
surgiendo que no son hechos inconexos: una honda
causalidad los convierte en fenomenos encadenados. Hay
una relacion equivoce entre estos seres esclavizados,
humillados a realizar trabajos degradantes, esos niﬁos
abandonados, y una caste de opresores que el poeta siempre
identifica con los dueﬁos de oro. Parece como si de modo

mes o menos expreso estuviera discurriendo en terminos

108

109

marxistas: dos clases enfrentadas de las cuales la una
soporta e1 capital y la otra e1 trabajo." Juan Cano
Ballesta, Literaturg y teconologig: Lgs letras espaﬁolas

 

gnte lgwrevolucién industrigl (1900-1933) (Madrid:
Editorial Origenes, S. A., 1981). p. 217.
5. These are some of the most informative studies

with regard to, A) a personal/biographical perspective

 

on Lorca’s works: Arturo Barea, Lorca, The Poetjgnd His
Peoplg, trans. Ilsa Barea (New York: Harcourt, Brace,

1949): Ray Campbell, Lorcg: An Apprecigtion of His Poetry
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952): Daniel
Eisenberg, "A Chronology of Lorca's Visit to New York and
Cuba," Kentucky Romgncejgugrterly 24 (1977): 233—50:
Richard L. Predmore, "Nueva York y la consciencia social

de Federico Garcia Lorca," Revista Hispénicngoderng, 36

 

(1970—71): 32~40: and Kessel Schwartz, "Garcia Lorca and

Vermont," Hispania, 42 (March, 1959): 50—55. and to: B)
a psychological perspective on his works: José Marie

Aguirre, "El sonambulismo de Federico Garcia Lorca, in
FedericongrcigjLorcg, Idelfonso—Manuel Gil, ed. (Madrid:
Taurus Ediciones, 1975), pp.97-120. Betty Jean Craige,
Lorca’s 'Poet in New York:' The Fgll Into Congciouggggg
(Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1977): Geri
LaGuardia, "The Butterflies in Walt Whitman’s Beard:
Lorca's Naming of Whitman," Neophilolgggg, 62 (1978):
540-54: José Ortega. "Retorno y denuncie de la ciudad:

Poetg en Nuevg York,” Sin Nombre, 11 (Oct./Dec., 1983):

110

41—50; and Richard Lionel Predmore, Lorcg’s New York

 

Poetry: Social Injustice, Dgrk Love, Lost Faith (Durham,

 

NC: Duke University Press, 1980).

6. Arnold Hauser, "Sociology of Art,‘ in Marxism and
ALE, Berel Land and Forrest Williams, eds. (New York:
Longman, Inc., 1972), p. 278.

7. Harold Baron provides some useful statistics when
considering the Black migrations to American urban areas
at the beginning of the century: "Migration out of the
countryside started in 1915 and swept up to a human tide
by 1917. The major movement was to northern cities, so
that between 1910 and 1920 the black population increased
in Chicago from 44,000 to 109,000: in New York from 92,000
to 152,000: in Detroit from 6000 to 41,000: and in
Philadelphia from 84,000 to 134,000 (Harold Baron, "The

Demand for Black Labor,’ in The Cgpitglist Sygtem: A

Rgdicgl Analysis of Americgn Society, Richard C Edwards,

 

 

Michael Reich, and Thomas E. Weisskopf, eds. (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1978). p. 373.

8. ., pp. 375—76.

 

9. Richard Saez, "The Ritual Sacrifice in Lorca’s
Poegg_en Nuevg_York," in nggg, Manuel Duran, ed.
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice—Hall, Inc., 1965), p.
113.

10. J. M. Aguirre, "El sonambulismo de Federico

Garcia Lorca,‘ in Federico Garcia Lorca, Idelfonso Manuel

Gil, ed. (Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, 1975), p. 115.

111
11. Among the most important studies are: Geri
LaGuardia, "The Butterflies in Walt Whitman’s Beard:
Lorca's Naming of Whitman," Neophilologgg, 62 (1978):
540-54: Richard Lionel Predmore, Lorchs New York Poetry:
Socigl InjusticeL Dgrk Lovgj Lost ngth (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 1980): Moraima de Semprun Donohoe, Las

 

narraciones de Federico Qgrcia Lorca: un franco enfoque

 

(Barcelona: Ediciones Hispam, 1975).

12. Lorca seems to have made a linkage between the
repression of homosexuals and the plight of Spanish women
of his day, whose husbands were often selected for them,
and who, once married, lost all individual liberty and

legal controls over their own lives. Three of Lorca's

 

famous dramas, Yerma, Bodgg de san re, and La casa de
Bernarda Alba contain implicit, but very harsh criticism
of the Spanish society's treatment of women.

13. José Ortega, "Surrealismo y eroticismo: Asi gue
pggen cinco gﬂgg de Garcia Lorca," Qgrcia Lorcijeview,
X, No. 2 (Spring 1982), p. 87.

14. Predmore, Dark Love, p. 69.

 

15. , p. 66.

16. Bruce Swansey and José Ramon Enriquez,
”Homosexuality in the Spanish Generation of 1927: A
conversation with Jaime Gil de Biedma," Ggy,Sunghine, 42—
43 (1980), 19. De Biedma made these comments in 1982.
Since that year, other dramatic works written by Lorca

have come to light, among them a work entitled Lg

IF“

HL
“'1
Ma.

51

112

destruccién de Sodoma. This finding, then, refutes

 

Biedma's assertion that Lorca's alternative title for g;

publice was La destruccion de Sodomg. This confusion of

 

Biedme's part is due to the fact that for many years,

scholars knew of the title Lg_destruccién de Sodomg. but

 

were unaware that an actual work was in existence. For
more details on the newly discovered texts of some of

Lorca's incomplete plays, Miguel Garcia Poseda’s

 

"Introduccién," to the Caggjde Bernarda Alba cited
earlier, is helpful, as well as his article on the same
subject: Andrew A. Anderson, "The Strategy of Garcia
Lorca's Dramatic Composition 1930-1936," Romance

Quarterly, 33, No. 2 (May 1986), pp. 221-9.

 

17. Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Mgn in Segrch ofwggSoul
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1933), p.
100.

18. Ian Gibson, "Lorca's 'Balada Triste:' Children's
Songs and the Theme of Sexual Disharmony in Libro de

Poemas,’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 46 (1969), pp. 37-

 

8.

19. Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1961), p. 164.
20. Leslie Fiedler, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in,

Huck Honey!" in FivggApproaches to Litgggry Criticigm,
Wilbur 5. Scott, ed. (New York: Collier Books,
Macmillan, 1962), pp. 305—6. Fiedler discusses the white—

black—boy archetype further when he writes: "Nature

113

undefiled——this is the inevitable setting of the Sacred
Marriage of males. Ishmael and Queequeg, arm in arm,
about to ship out, Huck and Jim swimming beside the raft
in the peaceful flux of the Mississippi—-here it is the
motion of water which completes the syndrome, the American
dream of isolation afloat. The notion of the Negro as the
unblemished bride blends with the myth of running away to
sea, of running the great river down to the see (p. 309)."

Lorca was not the only poet who dealt with this
tried. The black-white—child-love motif was included by
another poet, Robert Duncan, in some of his works as well.
But Duncan credits Lorca for this influence: ". . . .in
the summer of 1942, in Berkeley, Rosario Jiménez read
Poetgwen NuevggYork aloud to me in its own music and
language. Her voice entranced and lifted the hearer into
a soaring sense of poetry, and "Ode a Walt Whitman" and

"Llanto per Ignacio Sénchez Mejias,’ those two immortal
poems of Lorca's, rang in my heart in her reading. But it
was "Oda a1 Rey de Harlem" that most struck me. It
awakened some realm of my childhood dreams, of wild and
splendid animals, negro kings, and I asked for the poem to
be read again and again, having the insatiable insistence
of a child. . . (Eckbert Faas, Young Robert Duncggi
Porgggjt of the Poet gggHomogexugl in Society (Santa
Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1983), pp. 126-27.

21. Fiedler, p. 310.

22. Henry Cohen, "Apocalypse of the Avenues: The New

114

York Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca and Léopold Sédar

 

Sengher," Language ngrterly, 16, iii—iv (1978), 45—48.
23. Federico Garcia Lorca, "Iré a Santiago. . .," in

Obrgg_complggg§ (Madrid: Aguilar, S. A., de ediciones,
1966), p. 1713. Interviewed by L. Méndez.

24. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Esggys in Criticg;
Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 258. Harold Moss
links poems written about New York precisely with this
negation of Nature and loss of tranquility: "And I think
a case could be made for New York poems being by Nature
elegiac. Nature itself is being yearned for, mourned, or
denied. The parks, rivers, trees, birds, flowers, and
plants of New York are the last things to be associated
with it, if at all: yet to New Yorkers they are
significant connections to childhood, important
backgrounds to events-~they keep the scale human. There
is, in these poems, an undercurrent, a running regret,
perhaps, that sounds a small musical theme hardly heard in
the large orchestration of subways, sirens, horns, voices
(in English and Spanish), radios, TV sets, jet planes, and

traffic (Howard Moss, "Introduction," in New York: Poems

 

(New York, New York: Avon Books, 1980), p. xx.).

25. Lorca's own political evolution is treated later
in this study.

26. Federico Garcia Lorca, Obras completes,
"Intoduccion," de Miguel Garcia Poseda, ed. Miguel Garcia

Posada (Madrid: Akal Editor, 1982), pp. 71—72.

CHAPTER THREE

Lorca's poetry evolved over time. His initial poetic
works do not seem to articulate an interest in narrative
arrangement, but later poetic compositions such as Poema

del cgnte jondo, Romgncero gitano, and most notably Poete

 

en NuevgﬁYork, do.

Poeta en Nueva York is composed of ten subdivisions,
each with its own thematic emphases. Each poem in this
work draws meaning and intensity from the poems which
precede and follow it. The poems were not randomly
distributed by Lorca, but rather, were ordered so as to
enhance the poetic intensity of his work.

Lorca's collection was revised time and again over a
six year time span. Considered as a whole, the work
possesses a unity of structure and a dynamism which Lorca
incorporated in order to convey his on-going reactions and
experiences in New York. Ricardo Gullon perceived in this
work the striving of a poet to unify his poetic
impressions of New York in a structured and logical
fashion:

[es] una estructura de apariencia ilegica en que
los diversos planes no se hallan claramente
relacionados. La inconexion se resuelve, sin
embargo, cuando entendemos el dinamismo
estructural, con un obligado descenso que impone
a1 texto unidad tematice, aunque éste incluya e
integre variaciones metaforicas y metamorfosis
verbales. Abolidas 1as asociones "normales", se

precede a la lecture desde la perspective del
visionario (1).

115

116

By the time that Poetg_en Nuevg_York was written,
its author had come under the influence of a variety of
forces and artistic movements. He had been influenced by
the poets and artists of his own country, a group so
diverse that it included Garcilaso, Juan Ramon Jiménez,
and Luis Cernuda and also his friend Salvador Dali. The
political climate both within and outside of Spain,
discussed in the introductory chapter, also exerted an
influence on Lorca. By the year of his arrival in New
York, he had already ventured into the oniric realm of

surrealism in his book Romgncero gitano which was

 

published in 1928. In a sense, Poetg en Nuevg York may be
viewed as a "bridge" crossed by Lorca which helped him to
expand into the field of drama. The New York poems are
poetry, to be sure, but a definite trend toward narrative
and dramatic dynamism can be discerned through his use of
different narrators, and divisions of the work into
"scenes." José Ortega notes the important role which
Poete en Nueva York played in Lorca's evolution as a
dramatist:
El surrealismo de Poete en Nuevg York es la
plasmacién ideologica del periodo histérico
concrete de la crisis de 1929, crisis que
acarrea un nuevo espiritu que estéticamente se
evidencia en la necesidad de Lorca per encontrar
un instrumento de mas amplio alcance
comunicativo, social, vehiculo que el teatro iba
a proporcionarle. . . (2).

To date, very few analyses have been made of the

relationship which exists betweeen Lorca's evolution as a

117
post and his evolution as a dramatist. This is an area
which once investigated would reveal a great deal about
both Lorca's poetry and his dramas.
The division between poetry and drama has never been
absolute. This is demonstrated by a reading of the Greek
Classics as well as works by other noted dramatists,
ranging from Calderon to William Shakespeare. The plays
these famous dramatists wrote relied much more on the
spoken word, usually in poetic verse, than action or
scenic considerations. Later, the dramatic medium
incorporated other methods and means of expression, and
was allowed to drop strict rhyme and meter scheme in favor
of a more thorough and true—to-life interchange of
dialogue. This is not to say that poetic expression was
exiled from the dramatic medium, but rather, just as it
may be said that poetry expanded as it incorporated new
poetic forms such as free verse, drama did much the same
thing as it incorporated free expression through natural
dialogue. This correspondence between drama and poetry is
described by Martin Foss:
There is, however, one form of poetry which
leads more than any other to the realization of
the world. The tension of a indivisible present
stretches here over things and happenings and
unites them in a process of universal validity:
the Drama. . . (3).

If one accepts Foss' assertion that drama is a form of

poetry, then it can be said that in Poete en NuevggYork

the inverse is true as well. Lorca's poetry becomes a

118

fonncﬁ drama, and borrowing from various avant~garde

cimmmtographic techniques that were in vogue at the time

ofitscmmposition, Poete en Nuevg York epitomizes the

fushnxof the poetic and dramatic means of expression.

Any attempt to determine to which literary medium

Garchaiprca was more attracted would not be fruitful.

It istnue that he published poetry before his dramas, but

drmmnic techniques can be determined in earlier poetic

works such as Poema del Cante jondo and Cancioneg.

Lorca's traditional major themes however, love, death, and

oppression, are as present in the Libro de poemas as they
are in his later dramas such as Bodas de sangre and Yermg,

even though several years separate the publication of the

former from the latter.

Carl Gustav Jung offers a psychological perspective
on the dynamism of the creative process which may be

applied to Lorca's poetic and dramatic compositions.

According to Jung, the dynamism of the poet's own life is

zweflected in a logical order in the very text that he

produces:

Whenever the creative force predominates, human

life is ruled and moulded by the unconscious as
against the active will, and the conscious ego
is swept along on a subterranean current, being
nothing more than a helpless observer of events.
The work in process becomes the poet's fate and
determines his psychic development. It is not
Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which

creates Goethe (4).

This dynamic process to which Jung refers is easily seen

in Lorca’s New York poetry. He produced a book of poetry,

119

m‘tm¢,)mt was himself, in a manner of speaking, a

'prmnmt"of the dynamism of his own era. Lorca was no

longer capable of producing an unrelated series of poems

asrm hmi done in his earlier work, Libro de poemas . By

19%L hermd moved toward the integration of his life

experiences into a dynamic whole, to make evident the

conthudty of life experience through the act of writing.

It is not surprising that the medium of

cinematography, which was in its nascent, exploratory

stages at the time of Lorca’s visit to New York became one

of the most significant influences on his poetry. He made

the connection automatically and intuitively between the

poetic drama and the cinema. Juan Cano Ballesta offers

some observations on the cinematographic medium, and its

influence on the poet. He stresses that one of the prime

reasons that Lorca was attracted to this medium was its

revolutionary vibrancy, which tended to break down any

pre-conceived order which held an establishment, social or

political, rigidly in place:

Les técnicas cinematograficas abundan en la
poesia lorquiana. La experiencia de Nueva York
y del cine le hen inspirado un lenguaje poético
que ordena los objetos paratécticamente, los
.amontona sin distinciones valorativas, los
encadena o enfrenta. Es el mundo moderno de los
.aﬁos veinte en su fluir de impresiones, imagenes
)r sonidos el que bulle en su poesia. La
.anarquia primitive de los instintos explota en
'versiculos que no obedecen a ningﬁn molde o
riorma. Son la proyeccion de un mundo en
ciesequilibrio y lejos de todo intento
~jerarquizador. Una ideologia critica y

x‘evolucionaria halla expresion en un lenguaje
\rigoroso y rebelde. Su vision negative obedecia

120

a una convicci6n profunda y al deseo sincere de
cambiarle. No es puro tema artistico. Lorca
esta tomando parte en la vasta lucha ideologica
de su tiempo que es la lucha entre naturaleza y
tecnologia entre campo y ciudad, entre mundo
obrero y burguesia capitalists (5).

C.B. Morris describes Lorca's interest in the cinema
as:anmans by which the poet could "tap into" another

realihn one which the world of appearance does not

a screen play

kisses

portray. He cites, in addition to PNY,

which Lorca wrote during his sojourn in New York,

la lune. That the poet worked on both works at the same

time would seem to indicate that he was highly influenced

by cinematographic techniques while in New York:

Many similar sequences of images in the poems of
Poete en Nuevg_York [similar to Lorca’s screen
play Trip to the Moon] show the intimate
connection in Lorca between the poet and the
potential filmmaker. In poem and in film, the
effect and intention of such images are the
same: to transport us to a plane of fantasy
where physical laws are no longer valid, where
things are not what they appear to be, where
people are not what their uniform makes them

seem (6).

Several years after Poetg_en Nuevg_York was written,

 

Lorca wrote his famous Llanto_por la muerte de

 

 

in 1934,
Ignecdxa Sanchez Mejias," a work replete with imagery and

stylistics borrowed from drama and the cinema. Each of

the five sections or subdivisions of this lengthy poem are

titled, and they form a unity in which each relies on the

subdivision which precedes and follows it for completion

of its meaning. The death of the bullfighter Sanchez

Mejia-is is graphically depicted and chronicled in such a

121
way that it follows a evolving narrative structure of its
own. From the death of the bullfighter for example, we
move to a scene of the body laid out, and from there to a
"scene" describing the absent soul. This linear narration
is very much reminiscent of that which is to be found in
gﬂi. Of interest as well in this regard is that two of
Lorca's most famous dramas were published subsequent to
Llanto, ngc_sa de Bernarda Alba, and Yerma. Lorca seems
to have fused the media of poetry and drama in several of
his works. Bodas de sangre, in fact, is written in poetic
verse. The time juxtapositions of the New York poetry as
well as its narrative structure, and the extensive setting
descriptions in the dramas as well as the "poetic
dialogues" of the characters all bear witness to Lorca's
willingness to include elements of both drama and poetry
in his works. In a sense, then, this was a return to the
poetic dramas of previous centuries, and what is
especially significant in an analysis of the narrative
structure of ﬁg: is that by incorporating the evolving and
dynamic aspects of drama into a work of poetry, it became
impossible for Lorca ggg to order his poems in an
evolutionary manner. It becomes increasingly difficult to
separate the poet from the dramatist in Lorca as his work
evolves. To establish this point, Juan Caballero's

comments on the highly poetic qualities of La casa de

 

Berggrda Albg are relevant:

Y eso hacen los personajes de La casg‘de

 

122
Berngrdg‘Albg: gritan, lloran y se desesperan
con un lenguaje desprovisto de versos y tomado

de la realidad andaluza, pero estilizado en
colores y simbolos haste integrarse en poema

(7).
Vicente Cabrera, although he might just as well have cited
Yerma or Bodgg de sangre for his examples, also points out
the poetic nature of La casgide Berngrdg Alba:
(. . .)La casa de Bernarda Alba is a highly
poetic drama. Its imagery is so coherently
constructed and complete that the play becomes a
poem, a dramatic poem structured with an
extensive ambivalent metaphor: the house of
Bernarda Alba, with all of its symbolic and
poetic implications (8).
The idea that Lorca did not wish to separate poetry from
his drama is signaled by the poet himself in the preamble
to La casa de Bernardnglba: Following a list of the
characters on the first page of the play, Lorca has added,
"El poeta [emphasis mine] advierte que estos tres actos
tienen la intencion de un documental fotogréfico (9)."
This merging of poetry and drama as a medium of
artistic expression occurred at some point between the
writing of Libro de poemgg, which as mentioned earlier,
contained little or no structural evolution or anecdotal
cohesiveness, and the writing of Lorca's dramas. The
poems which comprise both Poemg_denggntg,jondo and
Romancgro gitggg are linked themgticglly, but a narrative
sequence, if present at all, is much weaker than that of
EN; where the poems seem ordered by an over—riding

narrative arrangement, each poem having been strategically

placed to produce a more dynamic and unified composition.

123
Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg have noted that the
term "narrative" has taken on a limited connotation over
the last two centuries to refer specifically to the novel.
They are opposed to this narrow interpretation of
narrative, and write:
By narrative we mean all those literary works
which are distinguished by two characteristics:
the presence of a story and a story—teller. A
drama is a story without a story—teller: in it
characters act out directly what Aristotle
called an "imitation" of such action as we find
in life. A lyric, like a drama, is a direct
presentation, in which a single actor, the poet
or his surrogate, sings, or muses, or speaks for
us to hear or overhear. . . . For writing to be
narrative no more and no less than a teller and
a tale are required (10).
The "limited view" of narrative referred to above perhaps
partially explains why so little attention has been paid
to this aspect of Lorca’s New York poetry. Narrative has
been traditionally (at least for the last two centuries)
associated almost exclusively with the novel, and for this
reason, no attempt to analyze this poetic composition with
regards to its narrative structure has been undertaken.
Scholes' and Kellogg's observations are instructive for
any examination of PNY, and their discussion of the story
and the story—teller offer a useful point of departure to
be used in clarifying narrative voice and narrative
structure in PNY. Several Lorca scholars over the years
have chosen to analyze this work in terms of "how Lorca

felt" when he wrote these rather bleak poems.

Unfortunately, any attempt to analyze Lorca's personal

124

psychology does an injustice both to him and to the New
York collection. Upon close observation, the careful
reader discovers that these are not the words of Garcia
Lorca himself, but rather, that they are the words of a
narrator, who, certainly, may be expressing some of the
poet's thoughts and perceptions, but who, in the end, is a
narrator, whom we can only loosely associate with Lorca.
Indeed, the choice of a generic ”poeta" in the title of
the work demonstrates a certain distancing on Lorca's part
from his narrator, or "story—teller," to use Scholes' and
Kellogg's term. If there is any doubt as to the textual
existence of this narrator—~who is not Garcia Lorca—~in
this collection, it can be easily dispelled by referring
to some of the correspondence between Lorca and his
friends and family during his stay in America. In a
letter written to his friend Melchor Fernéndez Almagro
from New York on the 30th of September, 1929, he describes
his state of animation in the following way:

Yo me encuentro alegre, con una alegria de

primavera reciente y asisto a estos prodigiosos

partidos de foot-ball con el candor del mejor

aficionado. Creo que he hecho una buena cosa

con este viaje (11).
It would be problematic indeed to link these words with
the more pessimistic words of the "poeta" of PNY. For

am

this reason, it is a pointless analysis of PNY which takes
as a starting point "how Lorca felt in New York," for the

simple reason that Lorca appears to have taken great care

in the creation of this generic poet, who most certainly

125

voices Lorca's perceptions indirectly, but never speaks
£93 him. In fact, when an analysis of the work's
narrative structure is undertaken, a logical way to refer

to the narrator of these poems is "the poet,’ and not
Garcia Lorca, who took great care to infuse a personality
of his own into his narrator.

The complexity of the narrative component in this
work is much easier to apprehend if certain tools
of modern literary theory are employed. Since the poems
in ﬁg: are ordered systematically, in an evolving
narrative fashion, it is helpful to bear in mind the
structuralists' theory of the "histoire" and the

"discours." The term "discours,' according to Seymour
Chatman, deals with the techniques which a writer employs
in order to narrate his story line, or plot. These can
involve a myriad of innovative, or traditional techniques,
such as changes in the narrative voice, flashback
sequences, or stream of consciousness writing. The plot
itself, then, is the "histoire." Although these terms are
usually associated with the novel, there is no reason not
to apply them to £51, because there is a definite plot in
the composition, and Lorca has used some highly innovative
techniques, most notably in the area of narrative voice,
to accentuate this plot. Chatman makes the following
observation concerning the writer’s use of a narrator, and

it is useful to bear his words in mind when analyzing PNY:

Even dialogue has to be invented by an author.

126

But it is quite clear (well established in
theory and criticism) that we must distinguish
between the narrator, or speaker, the one
currently "telling" the story, and the author,
the ultimate designer of the fable, who also
decides, for example, whether to have a
narrator, and if so, how prominent he should be.
The "narrator," when he appears, is a
demonstrable recognizable entity immanent to the
narrative itself. Every narrative, even one
wholly "shown" or unmediated, finally has an
author, the one who devised it (12).

Chatman further clarifies the relationship which exists
between author and audience, and how the "histoire~
discours" process mediates that relationship:
Narratives are communications, thus easily
envisaged as the movement of arrows from left to
right, from author to audience. But we must
distinguish between real and implied authors and
audiences: only implied authors and audiences
are immanent to the work, constructs of the-
narrative—transaction-as-text. The real author
and audience of course communicate, but only
through their implied counterparts (13).
Chatman’s ideas, taken in conjunction with Umberto Eco's
comments on literary texts assist in recognizing the great
lengths to which Lorca went to order his text, and to
instill life into his narrator/protagonist. Eco writes:
Thus, art seems to be a way of interconnecting
messages in order to produce a text in which:
a) many messages, or different levels and planes
of discourse, are ambitiously organized: b)
these amiguities are not realized at random, but
follow a precise design (14).
Chatman and Eco's comments are instructive, because they
stress the importance of the distancing of the author from
his narrator, or from his "planes of narration." As

already mentioned, Lorca did this seemingly intuitively

when he titled the work, and named his generic poet. It

127

is that poet who narrates Lorca's chronicle in the city,
as will now be shown in an analysis of the individual
poems.

The analysis of the work, using the models mentioned
above, will entail a study of both the text's gigggigg and
discours. First, a study is made of the content of each
poem in the work, and how the narrative thread (a "plot,"
or histoire) gives the work a narrative cohesiveness.
Then, the techniques employed by the poet to order this
structure (discours) is studied. Narrative voice, an
important component of discours is studied thereafter in
detail. Michael Riffaterre's concept of the "poetic

matrix,’ a process which reduces each poem to its "bare
essentials" in terms of theme or message, has been added
to the model to aid in this process. Based on this
concept, a study is made of the kind of narration Garcia
Lorca has employed in order to enhance these thematic
matrices.

There have been critics over the years who have
accused Riffaterre of "poetic reductionism" due to his
theories. But his matrix model has still been chosen to
be used in this study for two reasons: 1) A certain
"reductionism" is necessary because the numerous poems are
so diverse in nature and theme, that the matrix is one of
the few useful and helpful ways of relating their

narrative structures to their themes, and 2) the matrix

model, in the and, may very well be "reductionist," but

 

128
not in the negative sense of the word, as some critics
have used it against Riffaterre. For example, Jonathan
Culler makes some interesting observations concerning

Riffaterre's matrix model which clears Riffaterre's name

and ideas (15).

The first poem in PNY is entitled "Vuelta de paseo,"
and in it, several lightening fast images of the urban
"monster" are presented. There is an element of speeded
up time sequencing in this first poem, since there is
little action narrated: the poem is rather a series of
metaphors and images which flash quickly into the
consciousness of the poet and the reader. The poet
(Lorca's narrator) portrays New York in a most negative
fashion. He feels lost and alone in the city and sees
himself as having been "asesinado por el cielo,” as he
wanders amidst such images of destruction and malaise as a
butterfly drowned in an inkwell and a dead tree stump. In
a verse frequently left uncommented by the critics, he
declares, "dejaré crecer mis cabellos." This line becomes
more significant as the narrative unfolds in the poems
which follow, because once the reader realizes that a
large portion of the work parallels certain elements of
the Biblical story of Christ, then the long hair can be
seen as an attempt by Lorca to identify his poet
physically with Jesus.

In the second poem in the work, "1910 (Intermedio),"

129

thexmet narrates an earlier, happier time of his life:

Aquellos ojos mios de mil novecientos diez

no vieron enterrar a los muertos
ni la feria de ceniza del que llora per la madrugada

ni el corazon que tiembla arrinconado como un caballito
de mar (22).

Themelines embody the poet’s desperate attempt to escape

interns pest~—a past which as the poem indicates, was

nmch more peaceful and tranquil. This poem is a natural

reaction to the conditions described in "Vuelta de paseo"
in which the poet feels utterly abandoned as he roams the

frenetic streets of New York City and tries to adjust.

As already mentioned, Lorca was interested in the

potential application of cinematographic techniques to

poetry. This interest is notable in the third poem "La
Aurora." The present tense first person narration of
"Vuelta," passes to the past tense first person narration
of "1910," and then changes to the more dispessionate

third person narration. The imagery of "La Aurora" is

highly visual, and the reader realizes that much of it

could have been easily captured on film. The poet's

depiction of the city is bleak:

La aurora de Nueva York tiene
cuatro palomas de cieno

y un huracén de negras palemes

que chapotean 1as aguas podridas. . . (24).

But;:mhat would be missing from any similar celluloid

presentation of the city are the striking metaphors for

:uhicﬂu Lorca is so well known. For example:

Por los barrios hay gentes que vacilan insomnes
como recién salidas de un naufragio de sangre (26).

130

Themastrange sights, and others described in "La Aurora"

ﬂute the poet to once more take refuge in his past, and

thefburth poem in the work is a narrative reminiscence of

tﬂwee childhood friends, all three new "momificados" by

the passage of time. He repeats their names, "Enrique,
Emilio, Lorenzo" five different times in the poem, and
This

twice changes the sequence of the names repeated.

creates the effect of an echo, of a repetition which

sounds down through the years, and brings lost friends to

the forefront of the poet's memory. All three of these

childhood friends meet with unfortunate ends. They are

"frozen, burned, and/or "buried" in the adult world of

beds, roofless colleges, and billiard halls. When the

poet writes at the end of this "round," "comprendi que me

habian asesinado," the words reflect a melancholy desire

to return to a time of happiness and camaraderie--the

passage of time which had done away with his friends had

done the same to him as well: his childhood had been

permanently lost (16). This lost childhood becomes the

lead—in to the next poem, "Tu infancie en Menton (17)."

I]: is the poem which reaches farthest back into the early

life of the poet, and thus, fits logically into the

narwwative at this point. In "1910" the poet was a child,

111 "Fébula y rueda de los tres amigos, he was an

adolescent, but in "Infancia," he is a young child, a fact

uniicri is emphasized by the repetition of the verse "Si, tu

131

Sénece)." This poem

nﬁwz,yafébula de fuentes (39—40;

isnota «wcription of a child's happy and care—free

it is the description of a past,

days, but rather‘,
who now recognizes the menaces of

narrated by an adult,
The child~

tMadebLHtating and oppressive aging process.

iAmor, amor!," is

Yo quiero.

"Oh, 81.

like exclamation,
No me tepan la

followed by the sad command, ”Dejadme!

boca hnzque buscan espigas de Saturno per la nieve o

Sénece)." The poet

castran animales por un cielo (40,
and finds himself

emerges from this flashback sequence,
cold and cruel streets of New York

once again, on the

City.
' describes the black

"Norma y paraiso de los Negros,’
It should be noted that this

inhabitants of the city.
poem takes on an internal rhyme pattern and a rhythm much

more stylized than those of the previous poems reflective

of the puﬁhnitive dances and chants of the ancestors of the

This poem is a lengthy description of a

city's blacks.
a people who:

'Rnlt of their element" in New York,

people
(Ddian la flecha sin cuerpo
el paﬁuelo exacto de la despedida

la aguja que mantiene presion y rose

en el gramineo rubor de la sonrisa (32).

white and pink,

The colors mentioned in these verses,

and certainly, the "paﬁuelo

connote the white race,
:is .a reference to the stifled refinement which

exacto"
"poeta" obviously believes has stolen from the

Lorca’s
blacks, as well as the whites, the vital qualities of

132

spontaneity and freedom:

Amen el cielo desierto

1as vecilantes expresiones bovinas
la mentirosa luna de los polos

la danza curve del agua en la orilla

Con la ciencia de tronco y el rastre

llenan de nervios luminesos la arcilla

y patinan lﬁbricos per aguas y arenas

gustando la amarga fresura de su milenaria
saliva (32)

This poem, an encomium of the black culture and way of
life is followed by a vivid portrayal of blacks trapped
with no escape in the white man's urban technological
society. The imagery of "El rey de Harlem" is decidedly

bleak. "Los tanques de agua podrida, "1as muchachas

americanas [que] llevaban niﬁos y monedas en el vientre,"

"e1 rubio vendedor de aguardiente,’ are all signs of a
dominant race which has colonized and exploited the black
minority. Lorca exhorts the blacks to flee, "iHay que
huir!" and to escape from the servile positions in which
they find themselves: ". . . cuando los cocineros y los
camareros y los que limpian con la lengua/1as heridas de
los millonarios,... (38)." He urges the blacks to reject
the white culture as a whole, which he describes as a
"gentio de trajes sin cabeza (40)."
He further exhorts the blacks to "seek the sun," a

symbol in this instance of Nature itself:

Buscad e1 gran sol de centre

hecho una piﬁa zumbadora.

El sol que se desliza por los bosques

seguro de no encontrar una ninfa.

El sol que destruye numero y no he cruzado nunca un
sueﬁo,

133

el tatuado sol que baja por el rio
y muge seguido de caimanes (40).

Up until this point in the narrative, the poems have dealt
largely with the plight of the post, his inner turmoil as
he encounters New York, and the blacks, who, along with
himself, are seemingly trapped and overpowered by the
materialism and exploitation of the inhabitants of the
metropolis. The poem which follows "El rey de Harlem" in
the composition has caused perplexity on the part of
several Lorca scholars, because they have had great
difficulty in reconciling what they perceive to be its
theme with the black poems which precede it, and the poem

which follows it, "La danza de la muerte,’ which also has
black culture as a central theme. But if this poem,
"Iglesia abandonada (Balada de la gran guerra)" is viewed
in a wider context as one which introduces a series of
poems with strong biblical overtones, then, in fact, it
becomes one of the most pivotal in the work. Miguel
Garcia Posada has written that PNY draws a great deal of
its inspiration from the Bible: "La Biblia es una de las
grandee suministradoras de materiales a los poemas
neoyorquinos (18)," and in the latter part of the work
particularly, this becomes very apparent. The title,
then, of this poem, "Iglesia abandonada (Balada de la gran
guerra)," is significant, because it presages a religious

battle of sorts which is to follow almost throughout the

rest of the work. Although the "gran guerra" has been

134

interpreted as a reference to the First World War, the war
to which the title refers is most probably not that war at
all, but rather, a more fundamental conflict, the struggle
between good and evil itself, which the poet begins to
portray ever increasingly through allusions to Biblical
stories and events. The following verses from "Iglesia
abandonada" underscore the religious nature of the poem:
Yo tenia un hijo que era gigante
pero los muertos son mes fuertes y saben
devorar pedazos de cielo (42).
Me envolveré sobre esta lone dura para no sentir el
frio de los musgos
Sé muy bien que me daran una mange o la corbata
pero en el centre de la misa yo romperé el timon y
entonces
vendra a la piedra la locura de pingﬁinos y gaviotas
que haran decir a los que duermen y a los que canten
por las esquinas
El tenia un hijo
Un hijo. Un hijo. Un hijo
que no era mas que suyo porque era su hijo
Su hijo. Su hijo. Su hijo (44).
The narrative voice in this poem is fragmented into both
the first and third person. Since in later poems, Lorca'
narrator begins to identify with Christ and others who
meet sacrificial deaths, this fragmentation is highly
effective because it portends the merging of several
personalities into one which occurs later in the work.
The reference to the Mass makes it clear that there is a
religious concern in this poem. In a classic article
(19), Richard Saez recognized a desire on the poet's part

to offer himself as a "ritual sacrifice" for the purpose

of "saving" humans from industrial/technological

135

dehumanization, and bringing them to the "salvation" found
through harmonious renewal and return to Nature. Saez
argues convincingly that Lorca's poet takes on a Christ-
like role. It is thus in "Iglesia abandonada" that this
process of identification is begun in the narrative.

There is a desire exhibited on the part of the poet to
"steer" the Church away from its hypocritical and
dehumanizing practices, and back onto the path of pure
love as represented by Christ. This note of rebellion is
to be found in the line, "en el centre de la misa yo

romperé e1 timén,’ where the desire to destroy the
"rudder," the figurative tool used to hold the traditions
of the Church in place, would be an act of open hostility
against a church more interested in empty ritual than in
human fulfillment. In the poems which follow "Iglesia
abandonada," the rebellious challenges which the poet
issues to the Church will become even stronger.

It must be recognized at this point that Lorca was
probably not too concerned with the Catholic Church per
se. It appears that he simply "used" the Church as an
example of a bureaucracy that had grown out of hand, and
was now more of a spiritual "oppressor" than a
"liberator." In the poems which follow, Lorca's Biblical
references grow even more frequent, yet, he is most
probalbly only using these references in a limited context

as well. Indeed, several critics, among them Virginie

Halliburton and Allen Josephs believe that Lorca's poetry

136
was some of the most "un" or "anti—" religious poetry ever
written in Spain (20).

The linkage scholars have not elucidated is that
between "Iglesia abandonada (Balada de la gran guerra)"
and "Danza de la muerte," which follows it. Many critics
have been at a loss to explain this "rupture" between "El
rey de Harlem," and "La danza de la muerte," made by the
placement of "Iglesia abandonada" between the two poems
with the Black themes. Careful study, however, shows that
there is really no need to interpret this placement as a

rupture at all. In "El rey de Harlem,’ a powerless and
colonized people are described, who are incapable of
resisting the subservient and degrading roles which are
thrust upon them. However, once the "son" of "Iglesia
abandonada" has appeared to challenge the false doctrines
and exploitative practices of the whites (portrayed in
"Iglesia" as "penguinos" and "gaviotas"), then a "dance"
of rebellion and retribution can be made. This "Danza de

la muerte,’ reminiscent of both tribal African dances, and
the medieval "Dance of Death" does no harm to the blacks,
but rather, draws it strength and powers from their
primordial and innocent African culture. The dance
threatens only those who dwell in the bastions of power,
such as the Pope, and the millionaire, or those who
profane in some way a wholesome and healthy lifestyle,

such as "dry cathedral dancers, esmereldas, and Sodomites.

The capitalist establishment is particlarly signaled out

137

for destruction by the African mask which hovers
phantasmagorically over Wall Street (21):
Que ya la Bolsa sera una pirémide de musgo
Que ya vendrén lianas después de los fusiles
y muy pronto, muy pronto, muy pronto.
iAy, Wall Street!
E1 mascaron.;Mirad e1 mascaron!
iCémo escupe veneno de bosque
por la angustia imperfecta de Nueva York (52)!

The relationship between the exploited, but latently
powerful blacks and a Christ-figure is implicit in the
poem. Just as on the apocalyptic Judgement Day Christ is
to punish those who have done wrong, so the blacks,
fortified by their culture, and represented in this poem
in the mask itself, will one day have their victory and
vengeance over the whites.

"Paisaje de la multitud que vomita (Anochecer de
Coney Island)," and "Paisaje de la multitud que orina
(Nocturno de Battery Park)" are the two poems which follow
"Danza." Both of these poems portray a faceless and
nameless throng of people, who collectively represent the
mass man of a modern urban metropolis. The poet issues a
challenge to them to "travel through idiot's eyes to a
landscape of sepulchres which produce fresh apples."
Certainly the link made here between a sepulchre, a death
symbol, which produces "fruit," or life, is a reference to
Christ' victory over death. The verses which follow
further develop the allusion, and can be interpreted as

references to Christ as well: "el olor de un solo cuerpo

con la doble vertiente de 118 y rate, . . .(56)" allude

138
to Him, who, according to the Bible, conquered the evil of
the world (la rate), and at the same time, purified it
through HIs corporal death. The lily here serves as both
a death symbol, and as a symbol of purity.

In PNY, Lorca has created a narrative with both
protagonist and antagonist. His poet, whom he has begun
to identify with Christ, and the oppressed peoples of New
York, are pitted against the corrupt white race and their
social system which holds in place and perpetuates all of
the exploitative practices to which they are subjected.
The white establishment is epitomized in the entity of
Wall Street. Modern urban man "vomits" and ”urinates" in
the city; life within is foul and dirty. The black
culture of "green vegetation" and “animal freedom" rails
against this urban nightmare.

In the poem which follows "Paisaje de la multitud que

orina (Nocturno de Battery Place), the cold voice of a
homicide investigator questions a witness to the crime.

In "Asesinato (Dos veces de madrugada en Riverside
Drive)," the investigator pursues his facts in a cold and
relentless fashion, typical of that style of investigative
reporting to which we have all become accustomed in the
twentieth century. In fact, there is a strong element of
intertextual reference here, because, most of those who
read this poem can immediately call to mind some example

of a "hard boiled" journalist, who relentlessly pursues a

story even if it means cajoling a victim of a crime, or

139
those close to the victim. His questions are designed to
elicit "the facts, and just the facts:" "acomo fue?," and
his casual tone elicits a cry of anguish from the poet, "
Ay, de mi," for it is, in fact, the poet's figurative
death which is being described. The poet’s "murder" on
Riverside Drive coincides, interestingly enough, with
Christmas, because the poem which follows is "Navidad en
el Hudson." This poem is Lorca’s description of his
poet's "death"-—not his physical or spiritual death in
this instance, but rather, as his death gg a poet:

He pasado toda la noche en los andamios de los
arrabales

dejéndome la sangre per la escayola de los proyectos

ayudando a los marineros a recoger 1as velas
desgarradas

y estoy con las manos vacias en el rumor de la
desembocadura

No importa que cada minute

un niﬁo nuevo agite sus ramitos de venas

ni que el parte de la vibora desatado bajo 1as ramas

celme la sed de sangre de los que miran el desnudo

lo que importa es esto: hueco. Mundo solo.

Desembocadura

Alba no. Febula inerte

Solo esto: Desembocadura.

Oh esponja mas gris

0h cuello mio recién degollado

0h rio grands mio

Oh brisa mia de limites que no son mios

Oh filo de amor. Oh hiriente file (60)

In these lines, the poet sees himself as both "headless"
and "empty handed." Both are symbolic of his temporary
"poetic block." The emptiness which he feels is a link to
the first poem of the work, "Vuelta de paseo" in which
his feelings of utter hopelessness and inability to act

are also described. This poetic death is important

140

symbolically, just as the poet's "physical death"
eventually becomes, because it signals a turning point in
the narrative, where, from this point on, Lorca’s
protagonist/narrator will recognize the city for what it
is, an evil and dehumanizing force, and having recognized
it, no longer will be intimidated by it. Through this
figurative death, the poet is "reborn," and thus, it is
most appropriate that the poem in which it occurs is a
description of Christmas day in New York City. The day on
which the most famous birth in the world is commemorated
is the day on which a new post is figuratively born. The
poem which follows, "Ciudad sin sueﬁo (Nocturno del
Brooklyn Bridge), continues the idea of rebirth, and in
it, the first vestiges of a new hope on the poet's part
can be discerned:

Un die

los caballos vivirén en las tabernas

y las hormigas furiosas

atacaran los cielos amarillos que se refugian en los

ojos de las vacas
otro dia
veremos la resurreccién de las mariposas
disecadas
y aun andando por un paisaje de esponjas grises y

barcos mudos

veremos brillar nuestro anillo y manar rosas de
nuestre lengua (62)

This first reference to a resurrection is extremely
important at this juncture in the narrative. The
"resurrection" referred to here is the re-birth of Nature,
which has been mutilated in the city. The grey sponge

symbol has already appeared twice before in the previous

141

poem, "Navidad en el Hudson. In that poem, the grey
sponge had been associated with the poet himself ("Oh
esponja mia gris," p.61), and was used figuratively as a
type of "blotter" to soak up his bitterness and
psychological/artistic block, and to once again enable him
to be "reborn" as a new post. In "Navidad en el Hudson,"
the grey sponges serve a similar purpose. They dot the
landscape in this prophetic vision, having done their job,
and soaked up the evils and the pollution of the city.
New nature can reassert herself, which she does through
the form of the horses who take over the tavern, and the
furious ants who go about the business of destroying the
vacant city. The butterfly drowned in the inkwell of the
first poem of the work is in this poem symbolically
resurrected in the form of her fellow butterflies who have
struggled under the binds of the city, and the effects of
a "false science." The two butterflies thus form a
symbolic resurgence of the soul. In "Vuelta de paseo,"
the butterfly had been drowned in the ink of the
businessmen of New York. In this poem, the butterfly had
met its demise at the hands of a destructive science.
These two arch—villains, business and science, are, in
this poem, prophetically destroyed, and and an
unencumbered Nature retakes her city.

In the poems which follow this one, the theme of
resurrection will surface time and again, until it is

dealt with in a climatic fashion in "Ode a Walt Whitman,"

142

after the poet himself has undergone a period of renewal.
This period of renewal and recovery of lost identity and
strength is portrayed in the poem which follows, ”Panorama
ciego de New York." We see here again a description of a
desolate and polluted cityscape, yet several verses in
this poem presage a struggle yet to come between the
forces of life and the forces of death:
Todos comprenden el dolor que se relaciona con la
muerte
pero el verdadero dolor no esta presents en el
espiritu (64).
Nosotros ignoramos que el pensamiento tiene arrabales
donde el filésofo es devorado por los chines y las
orugas
y algunos niﬁes idiotas hen encontrado por las cocinas
pequeﬁas golondrinas con muletas
que sabian pronunciar la palabra amor (66).
In this poem, a rediscovery of true love has been made.
It is highly significant that "niﬁos idiotas" have made
this discovery, because in the poems which follow, and
especially in the "Ode a Walt Whitman," it is the naive
and innocent child who in fact saves the world from the
industrial/technological monster. There can be little
doubt about this connection after noticing that the poem
"Nacimiento de Cristo" is the one which follows. The
highly stylized and structured rhyme and meter scheme of
this poem, unusual up to now in the work, reflect an
ordering of the universe, brought about by the birth of
the Christ child:
E1 niﬁo llora y mira con un tres en la frente
San Jesé ve en el heno tres espigas de bronce

Los paﬁales exalan un rumor de desierto
con citaras sin cuerdas y degolladas veces

143

La nieve de Manhattan empuja los anuncios

y lleva gracia pure por las falsas ojivas

Sacerdotes idiotas y querubes de plume

van detras de Lutero por las altas esquinas (68)

The birth of Christ, then, as described in this

poem, is a birth laden with sadness. The child cries, and
there is no music or singing, because the
commercialization of a Manhattan Christmas has destroyed
the true significance of the birth. "Idiot priests" do
not perceive the real meaning of the child's birth either
(an intertextual reference to the Bible most probably,
when the pharasees condemned Jesus for his refusal to
practice a rigid, cold, and strict code of ritualized
religion), and continue to cater to a society which
cheapens the commemoration of the birth with exploitative
commercialism.

The four poems which follow "Nacimiento de Cristo"
form a kind of poetic respite from the city. In the past,
critics have attempted to interpret these four in terms of
Lorca's temporary escape from the city as he vacationed in
Vermont with his friend Phillip Cummings. By doing so,
they overlooked the crucial point that these poems do not
reflect Lorca's biography so much as they do his desire to
order the poems in a coherent narrative structure. The
poems belong here, ggg because, as some critics have
suggested, Lorca simply get his fill of New York, left for

Vermont for three weeks, and somehow came back refreshed

enough to issue the strong challenge to the city that he

144

does in the poems which end the book. In fact, some of
these poems were written in August, 1929, long before
Lorca was more than even slightly familiar with the
frenetic life of New York City. Lorca placed them in the
narrative, rather, because they represent the respite or
period of relief and renewel which would naturally follow
the birth of Christ (described in "Nacimiento de Cristo,"
the previous poem), or, as he is later portrayed, along
with several others who are ritually sacrificed, as the
"Savior" of mass man. Furthermore, all four poems are a
preparation of sorts for the poem which follows them,
entitled, "Muerte," and as will be seen later in a
discussion of that poem, Lorca's poet/protagonist begins
to view death in a new and almost positive form; he
accepts the fact finally, as opposed to his earlier views
of death described in the earlier poem, that a type of
ritualistic death is in fact a good, positive, and very
vital component of a purification—-resurrection process.
These four poems, then, reflect the poet's personal
struggle and vanquishment of his doubts and identity
crisis caused by an encounter with the modern world. This
escape from the city is important in the narrative,
because it offers the poet the opportunity to contemplate
and muse on philosophical questions that only the quiet of
a natural setting can provide. In the country, he ponders
nature, and broods over his own lost childhood, and in the

end, returns to the city a stronger, angrier, but inwardly

145

self-assured critic of the modern industrial metropolis.
"Poeme doble del lago Edem" is a "flashback" episode,

not unlike earlier ones such as "Tu infancie en Menton,"
and "1910 Intermedio." But here, there is a positive
tone, and an assertiveness that was not to be found in the
earlier poems:

No, no. Yo no pregunto yo deseo

voz mia libertada que me lames 1as manos

En el laberinto de biombos es mi desnudo el que recibe

La luna de castigo y el reloj encenizado (72).
The post now seems quite tranquil, in spite of the fact
that he now realizes that he may have to undergo some
amount of suffering. However, the voice of desperation,
which characterizes the poetry of the earlier section of
PNY has disappeared. He no longer laments his fate, but

M

accepts it, as can be seen from the following verses from

"Cielo vivo, the poem placed after "Poema doble del lago
Edem:"
Yo no podré quejarme
si no encontré lo que buscaba
pero me iré a1 primer paisaje de humedades y latidos
para entender que lo que busco tendra su blanco de
alegria
cuando yo vuele mezclado con el amor y las arenas
(74).
There is an element of acceptance and happiness now
associated with death, and the last verse is of special
importance, because it depicts a soul freed from earthly
ties. In these verses, the poet foresees a return to a

primordial and idyllic landscape, and no longer feels the

need to dwell on the pain of the past. In the poems which

146

follow, the poet begins to identify with, and to both love
and pity children, and their state of vulnerability and
innocence, much as Christ did in the Bible. "El niﬁo
Stanton" is a poem permeated with affection for the child,
a child who is figuratively menaced by the maturation

process.

In "Vaca,’ the poem which follows "Stanton,' the poet
looks directly on death, and in one of the goriest poems
of the book, describes the slaughter of a cow. One senses
though, that new that the poet has resolved to undergo a
type of figurative death himself, that he is no longer
threatened by the phenomenon, which is why he is able to
portray it so graphically in "Vaca." This is so true,
that in the poem following it, "Niﬁa ahogada en un pozo
(Granada y Newburgh), he can look on death in one of its
cruelest forms-~the striking image of an atrocious well
whose dead and stagnant waters refuse to yield up the body
of a young girl who has fallen in and drowned.

These short poems all portray episodes dealing with
death, and in particular, with the deaths of children.
Their placement in the text at this juncture, in a group,
is significant for the continuing narration of the
composition. In the first poem of the work, the poet felt
figuratively "assassinated." The poem portrays the lonely
wanderings of an individual who was so frightened and

overwhelmed by the modern metropolis that he felt a

certain psychological paralysis, and the city itself is

147

what threatened him with death, just as it did to all-~in
his view--who were trapped in positions of powerlessness
and servitude. The deaths described in later poems,
however, are detailed in a new tone. Lorca's
protagonist/narrator is able to look upon death new in all
of its ugliness, and not "flinch," or attempt to hide from
it through the use of flashback sequences, and nostalgic
narrations, as he did when he found himself in threatening
situations at previous junctures in the book. For

example, the poem "Vuelta de paseo,’ which describes the
threatening aspects of the American metrOpolis, was
followed immediately by "1910 (Intermedio)," a poem
nostalgic in tone.

The previous poems focused on the deaths of others,
such as the little girl or the butchered cow. Now, in the
next sequence of poems, the poet begins to deal with his
own death, and like a college, or a cinematographic
photomontage, the images and aspects of his own figurative
death are juxtaposed so that he may view this event from a
variety of different perspectives, or "camera angles," to
continue the simile of cinema.

The poem which follows "Niﬁa ahogada" is entitled
simply "Muerte." What immediately distinguishes this poem
from the ones which precede it is the return to first
person narrative in the latter half of the poem. The
first verses are narrated in the third person. The post

first lists a number of different animals who strive to

148

changes their status, or seek metamorphoses of some kind:

Qué esfuerzo,

que esfuerzo del caballo

por ser perro,

qué esfuerzo del perro por ser

golondrina,

qué esfuerzo de golondrina por ser abeja,

qué esfuerzo de la abeja por ser caballo (86).
By beginning this "round" with a horse which desires to
change its existence, and ending with the bee which
desires to take the form of a horse, the poet depicts a
"vicious circle" of life, wherein (if these animals may be
likened to humans) the same fate is met by all. People
appear to spend their entire lives dissatisfied with who
or what they are, and by attempting to be something that
they are not, they lose the valuable time that they might
have put to use had they been satisfied with their
existence. The end, of course, for all of these
unfulfilled desires is death, and it seems that the post,
when he changes from third person to first person
narration, has learned a lesson from their fruitless
strivings. He can now face his own death, satisfied that
he will now live it to its fullest, and not be concerned
with material concerns:

Y yo por los aleros,

qué serafin de llamas busco y soy. . . .

sin esfuerzo (86).
This portrayal of the poet's own material death, in which
he assumes the spiritual form of a seraphim, and finally

ceases the fight against the threat of death itself, can

be viewed as a culmination point, after which he

149
figuratively "goes limp" and accepts temporal death. This
accomplishment, in turn, stands out all the more when one
realizes that death has been a constant and overwhelming
obsession in much of Lorca's poetry, not only in PNY (22).
This poem is followed by "Nocturno del hueco."
which, as the title suggests, portrays the dreamless and
numbed sleep—state of death. The emptiness is spiritual,
and very much reminiscent of San Juan de la Cruz's "Noche

oscura del alma,‘ a poem which also somberly depicts the
passage of the spirit from darkness into the light of a
new re-birth and new life. In a series of images which
parallels the description of the state of emptiness, the
physical aspects of a body in decomposition are portrayed:

Ya terminaron las hormigas

Alguna leve sierpe de aire y hojas

subia por el muro de cal casi ahogada (92).
The wall of lime is a reference to the grave, and the
ants are depicted as having completed their work in
decomposing the body.

0. 00

The repetition of the pronoun yo in the verses
which follow those above changes the tone of the rest of
this poem by its almost incessant hammer-like quality. It
indicates immediately that the poet still "exists," even
if he has new undergone a figurative physical death. "Yo"
comprises the only word of a verse six different times in
the poem, but is still always associated with some form of

death or emptiness:

Yo

150

con el hueco blanquisimo de mi caballo
crines de ceniza, plaza pura y doblada (92)

The tone of this poem is one of finality, and the

0! 9'

repetition of ye serves to encapsulate the poet in his
own solitary death-state. Each use of the word "yo"
brings with it more intensity than the preceding one,
because more verses of the poem separate the repetitions.
Michael Riffaterre makes an observation which is extremely
useful when considering the repetition of the first person
pronoun in this poem:
Repetition is in itself a sign: depending as it
does upon the meaning of the words involved, it
may symbolize heightened emotional tension, or
it may work as the icon of motion, progress,
etc. (23).
In the case of this particular poem, the repetition really
serves all ends mentioned by Rifaterre. There is an
emotional quality of loss as the poet figuratively sheds
his former identity, but at the same time, the repetition
of "Yo" emphasizes that the poet has not ceased to exist.
Rather, he has simply taken on a new and evolving
identity. The repetition of the pronoun, then, becomes a
textual device which indicates evolution and dynamism.
Furthermore, the use of the pronoun to form a single verse
of the poem five different times signals a recovery of
strength, self—control, and self-reliance.
The tension created by the constant repetition of

ye reaches a climax in the final verses of the poem:

Yo
Mi hueco sin ti, ciudad sin tus muertos que comen

151
ecuestre por mi vida definitivamente anclado
Yo.

(No hay siglo nuevo ni luz reciente
Solo un caballo y una madrugada) (92)

The "former" poet, the one who had been intimidated by the
city, has, through this death process, conquered it. This
is evident in the poem’s final assertive "yo" before
ending with the verses in parenthesis, which conveys the
idea of a new day that is in store for the poet at some
future time.

The following work is a sensual, visual, and highly
aural one, with imagery which could be easily captured by
celluoide and a sound machine. "Paisaje con dos tumbas y
un perro esirio" is a cemetery scene. The poet still lies
figuratively buried. It is difficult to explain why there
are two tombs, unless one refers back to the previous
poem, in which Lorca's "horse"——often interpreted by
critics as the sensual, physical aspect of man in Lorca's
poetry——died along with him ("yo con el hueco blanquisimo
de mi caballo"). An imminent resurrection is hinted at in
this poem in these verses:

y la luna estaba en un cielo tan frio

que tuvo que desgarrarse su monte de Venus

y ahogar en sangre y ceniza los cementerios antiguos
(94)

The reference to the destruction of the cemetery can be
viewed as a victory over death, and it foreshadows a final
jubilant "resurrection" on the part of the post which will

appear later in the narrative.

152

In "Ruina,’ the grasses of an encroaching cemetery
threaten the dead man with eternal oblivion. But almost
at the last minute, he is extended a ray of hope and
salvation by an outstretched hand which will rescue him
from the "digestive saliva of the grasses:"

Vienen 1as hierbas, hijo:

ya suenan sus espadas de saliva

por el cielo vacio

Mi mane, amor (96)
It is love, hence, in the final analysis, which saves the
"dead" from eternal oblivion. These verses form a natural
lead in to the next poem of the work, which Lorca himself
labels a "love poem." In "Luna y panorama de los insectos

(poema de amor),' an epigraph from Espronceda's famous
nineteenth century poem, "La cancién del pirate" precedes
the text:

La luna en el mar riela

en la lone gime el viento

y alza en blando movimiento

olas de plate y azur (98)
The tranquil images of the seascape are ones which are
appropriate to quote at the beginning of a poem which
deals with the discovery of new-found peace and
tranquility. The word "alza" is especially important in
this context, because, the post, as has already been
demonstrated is working systematically toward a final
scene of regeneration and resurrection, which has its
poetic culmination in this poem. When he states, "Mi

corazon tendria forma de un zapato,’ and then, "mi corazon

153

tiene la forma de una niﬁa,’ he evokes a pantheistic world
of reincarnation, in which, he has now realized, he lives
through other people and things, even if he one day is to
meet a physical death. He reveals in this poem how
relative the concept of death can be, and that the death
he previously feared so much in the city no longer haunts
or terrorizes him. And thus, in this poem, after so many
which have not dealt with the theme, images of New York
appear once again:
La luz tiene un saber de metal acabado
y el campo de todo un lustre cabra en la mejilla de la
moneda (100)
In subsequent verses in the poem, the imagery of
decadence, and twentieth century ggggg, which would have
been very similar to the imagery of the first poems of the
work, have been ameliorated by the appearance of a
"cradle:"
No nos salve la gente de las zapaterias

ni los paisajes que hacen musica al encontrar 1as
llaves oxidadas

Son mentira los aires. Selo existe

una cunita en el desvan

que recuerda todas les cosas (102)
The cradle image may be a reference to the birth of the
Christ child, and this birth is now comprehended by the
poet in the true sense of "love." It is no longer
represented in the tinsel and commercialism described in

"Navidad en el Hudson,’ and this realization has given the
post the resurgence of hope and strength for which he has

so long been searching in his poetic text. This strength

154

in turn, has prepared him to challenge the modern urban
metropolis without fear, and issue a condemnation of all
of twentieth-century industrialization and technology,
which entices humans with false promises, and then
enslaves them.

The poet's spiritual death, then, has been
characterized by psychological trauma, and by a siege of
anxiety. Drawing some of his inspiration from both the
Eastern religions and Christianity, he figuratively "dies"
in order to return stronger and dominant. In the poem

which follows "Lune y panorama de los insectos,‘ Lorca's
narrator hurls a tremendous condemnation at the city which
has caused him and, in his view, other powerless peoples,
such suffering.

In "New York (Oficina y denuncia)," the city is seen
as the product of twentieth century capitalism and
industry, and thus, is portrayed in a series of images
which reflect the idea of mass production and mass man.
The first verse, "Debajo de las multiplicaciones," in its
initial position, points out that Lorca's protagonist
intuits that there is something profound to be discovered
beneath the appearance of the mass of people who inhabit
the great city, because they are, after all, human beings.
The millions of "forms" which the poet observes moving day
in and day out through the cityscape are singled out as

those who beer the burden of human unfulfillment and

estrangement from Nature:

155

Debajo de las multiplicaciones

hay una gota de sangre de pate:

debajo de las divisiones

hay una gota de sangre de marinero:

debajo de las sumas, un rio de sangre tierna (104).
The symbol of blood so often repeated in this poem is
reminiscent of the "blood" imagery of "E1 rey de Harlem."
In that poem, the blood represented the heritage of the
Black race, and their vital ties to Nature and to the
Earth. There is no reason to interpret the symbol any
differently in this poem. The poet is looking beyond the
cold and unfeeling society, portrayed above in an
impersonal and mathematical terminology, to the heritage
and whelesomeness that lies beneath this people who
seemingly have forgotten the ducks, rivers, and oceans.
Furthermore, in the Biblical context, blood is the symbol
of ritual cleansing, drawn from a "weak" man by a violent
society. Lorca's protagonist rebels against the powerful
and exploitative faction which inhabits this modern day
"Jerusalem":

Yo denuncio a toda la gente

que ignore 1a otra mitad

1a mitad irredimible (106)
This "Half beyond salvation" are those inhabitants of the
city who have been overlooked or expoited by the
establishment. The references to Christ then, are also
appropriate, because these are the very same people to
whom he was drawn in biblical times. In *NY, the

minorities most often portrayed in this fashion are

blacks, homosexuals, women, children, and all of those who

156

are oppressed by the establishment. The poet accepts a
new role as the "voice in the wilderness (or wasteland),"
because he has struggled with inner traumas, and has
conquered them. He predicts a time of dreadful suffering
for the inhabitants of the metropolis, if they do not
"mend their ways:"

aQué voy a hacer? aOrdena los paisajes?

aOrdena los amores que luego son fotegrafias?

Que luego son pedazos de madera y bocanadas de sangre

No, no: yo denuncio,

yo denuncio la conjure

de estas desiertas oficines

que no radian 1as agonias

que borran los programas de la selva

y me ofrezco a ser comido por las veces estrujadas

cuando sus gritos llenen e1 valle

donde e1 Hudson se emborracha con aceite (108).
When the poet offers himself "to be eaten" by the "crowded
cows" in the lines above, it is once again a Biblical
reference, since Christ "allowed himself" to be handed
over for his crucifixion.

In the poem which follows "Denuncio,' the poet
juxtaposes a Biblical event which ocurred two thousand
years ago with the present in order to communicate the
message that those who did not heed Christ's call for love
met their own perditions, just as he predicts the power
abusers of New York will. That portion of the Jews which
ridiculed and scorned Christ two thousand years ago are
portrayed by Lorca as the self-confident doctors and

lawyers of the metropolis, cogs in the industrial/

technological machine. They are condemned to a spiritual

157
death into whose hands they willingly play. Lorca

presents the followers of Christ as "winners,' and those
who persecuted him as "losers:"

Los niﬁos de Cristo cantaban y los judios

miraban la muerte. . . (108). . . . .

Verdes girasoles temblaban

por los paramos del crepﬁsculo

y todo el cementerio era una queja

de bocas de carton y trapo seco

Ya los nines de Cristo se dormian

cuando el judio apretando los ojos

se corté 1as manos en silencio

a1 escuchar los primeros gemidos (112).
As Richard Saez has noted, the "Jews" in Lorca's poetry
are used on a symbolic level only. There is no more an
anti—Jewish sentiment in EN: than there is an anti—
Catholic one, for example. However, at the same time,
Lorca's poetry often condemns human failings and hypocricy
whether these are embodied in the "Jews" of this poem, or
the "idiot priests" of "Navidad en el Hudson (24)." The
Jew, who represents modern man who is impervious to love,
is forced into self—immolation eventually when he loses
this struggle with the "children of Christ (i. e., the
powerless and alienated of the city)." The severed hands
in the lines above call to mind Christ's admonition to his
followers that it would be better for them to "cut off
their hand and enter heaven than to allow that hand to
continue to sin (25)."

"Crucifixién" is the poem which follows "Cementerio

judio (26)." In it, there is harsh condemnation for those

who value earthly possessions ever love and human

158

fulfillment. "Pharisees" are singled out time and again
in this poem for condemnation. They are the men who were
more interested in the law then the people or their
suffering, and certainly, there is a direct relationship
between their appearance in this poem, and the Jews of the
previous poem——those who did not heed Christ's message.
It should be stressed, though, that Lorca is not simply
re~telling a biblical story, but rather, that he was
borrowing from the biblical stories in order to draw the
parallels between Christ's plight, and his protagonist's
in New York, a city that he perceived was in need of
rescue from perdition.

The striking imagery of the first few lines recall

Christ's circumcision:

Un rayo de luz violeta que se escapaba de la herida
proyecto en el cielo e1 instants de la circuncision de
un niﬁo muerte (27).

Two Biblical events are juxtaposed in this poem. Christ's
circumcision is contrasted with his death. Both events
involved the spilling of blood. The wound in the second
verse can be easily associated with the wound in Christ's
side as he was hanging on the Cross. But more
importantly, the idea that Christ's death was a re—birth
has been central in several of these poems up until this
point, and in this poem, it becomes even more important.
7Tbs circumcision of a dead boy should be interpreted in
tliis light, because circumcision is usually associated

“11th new-born children, or with the attainment of

159

adulthood. Either interpretation will bear out an
affirmation of life in this poem, and not death.

Furthermore, in this poem alone, there are three

references to a "cow,' all made by the Pharisees:
Esa maldita vaca tiene tetas llenas de leche

Esa maldita vaca
tiene 1as tetas llenas de perdigones (223, Martin)

and
Esa maldita vaca, maldita, maldita, maldita
no nos dejaré dormir, dijeron los fariseos,
y se elsjaron a sus cases por el tumulto de la calle
dando empujones a los borrachos y escupisndo sal de los
sacrificios
mientras 1e sangre los seguia con un balido de cordero
(224, Martin).
This reinterpretation of Christ's sacrifice is evident in
these verses. The cow, which has already been introduced
in "Vaca" is representative of an innocent sacrificial
victim. The death of that cow in "Vaca," which died in
order to feed the multitudes of the city is associated
with Christ's own sacrifice. Since in Catholic
interpretation Christ also left his body to be consumed by
the multitudes in his memory, the association is obvious.
In this poem, the cow, although dead, continues to give
sustenance in the form of milk, and its blood pursues the
guilty Pharisees (We can perhaps read "Capitalists" here.)
through the streets and gives them no rest. The final
reference to the bleating of a lamb draws the parallel

between the cow and Christ even more strongly, since one

of Christ's most common epithets is the "Lamb of God."

160

The resurrection of Christ is incorporated into the
New York poetry to parallel the resurgence of strength and
power in the poet himself. He now realizes that he has
been abused by the metropolis with its rigid capitalist
economic system fixed securely in place, and more
importantly, the people with whom Lorca sympathizes most,
the poor and the exploited, have received equal or worse
treatment at the hands of this society. The poem which
follows "Crucifixion" demonstrates the anger and rebellion
of a people and a poet who have reached a point of such
complete solidarity that they will tolerate these abuses
no longer. Lorca's narrator/protagonist climbs
figuratively to the top of the then—tallest building in
New York, the Chrysler Building, in order to issue a cry
of rebellion that "sounds across the Atlantic" to the
tallest building in Rome, Saint Peter's Basilica. The
figures of the Pharisees continue in this poem, and the
poet accuses the Pope of being their main representative.
The historical event which triggered this angry outburst
was the Concordat which Pope Pius XI signed with Mussolini
on February 11, 1929 (28), and through which the Vatican
recognized (and through this recognition, sanctioned)
Mussolini's legitimacy as head of the Italian government.
It is for this reason, among others, that Pope Pius is
depicted in the most negative of fashions:

E1 hombre que desprecia la paloma debia hablar,

debia gritar desnudo entre las columnas
y ponerse una inyeccion para adquerir la lepra

161
y llora un llanto tan terrible
que desolviera sus anillos y sus teléfonos de
diamante.

Pero el hombre vestido de blanco

ignore e1 misterio de la espiga,

ignore e1 gemido de la parturienta

ignore que Cristo puede dar agua todavia

ignore que la moneda quema e1 base de prodigio

y da la sangre del cordero al pico idiota del faisan

(114—15).
The Pontiff is accused of a flamboyant materialism when
the poet describes the Papal rings, and "diamond
telephone." Furthermore, he exhorts the Pope to repent;
his cry of guilt amidst the columns of Saint Peter's
should sound out so loud that it bring about the
destruction of the materialism of the Vatican. Then he
demands that the Pope atone for his past actions by
"acquiring leprosy," a disease which, according to the
Bible, Christ risked acquiring often as he ministered to
those people who were treated as outcasts in Biblical
times, their disease considered at that time a punishment
from God for "sinful lives." The Pope's materialism is
related in this poem to Judas' selling of Christ through a
kiss in exchange for thirty pieces of silver. This is
powerful metaphor for Pius' "sell—out" to Mussolini and
the Fascists through the signing of the Concordat.
This condemnation of the Pope is the first step in a

poem which eventually forges a link between the abuse of
power in Rome, and the abuses of power and oppressive

practices of the American capitalist society:

Mientras tanto, mientras tanto zay! mientras tanto,
los negros que sacan 1as escupideras,

162

los muchachos que tiemblen bajo e1 terror pélido de
los directores
las mujeres ahogadas en aceites minerales,
la muchedumbre de martillo, ds violin e de nube,
ha de gritar aunque 1e estrellen los sesos en el
muro,
ha de gritar frente a las cﬁpules (116—18).
Thematically, the poems have returned once again to the
concern with the oppressed masses of urban society. But
structurally, this poem occupies an important place in the
work. All of the oppressed minorities which have been
singled out throughout this work now join the poet in a
mighty chorus, which is evidenced by the sudden resort to
first person plural narration, the sound of which will
bring the walls of the society "crashing down":
he de gritar leca de fuego,
ha de gritar loca de nieve,. . .
he de gritar con vez tan desgarrada
haste que 1as ciudades tiemblen come niﬁas
y rompan 1as prisiones del aceite y la musica.
Porque queremos el pan nuestro de cada dia,
flor de aliso y perenne ternura degranada,
porque queremos que se cumpla la voluntad de la Tierra
que da sus frutos para todos (118)
Lorca has thus brought his text almost full circle. The
first poem of PNY was narrated entirely in the first
person, with only two conjugated verbs in the entire poem.
This lack of verbs in the text creates a "stasis" which in
turn conveys an inability to act or move, and that
inability can be attributed to a type of paralysis on the
part of the post, as he searched for order and meaning in
a modern metropolis. In this poem, concrete images

flashed into his consciousness at an alarming rate as he

walked through the streets of the city. The poems which

163

follow this first one are either extremely negative in
theme and tone, such as "La Aurora," or they are nostalgic
backward glances, escapist in nature, towards happier
times and places. However, after the figurative
"resurrection" in the middle of the narrative, the poet is
finally able to narrate again with strength and self-
reliance, and this time with a voice of fearlessness and
condemnation-~"Yo denuncio" of "New York (Oficina y
denuncie)" is the most representative verse of this new
voice--and finally, the reader learns Egg the poet has
been able to recover his strength and his voice: because
by "sacrificing" himself for the powerless, they

have been enabled to add their voices to his. He has
found his true identity in the solidarity and potential
rebelliousness which exists in the millions of marginal
people of modern capitalist society.

Having discovered the sources of power which enable
him to challenge the rigid and repressive society, the
poet is compelled to textually "liberate" another
oppressed people, the homosexuals, in "Ode a Walt
Whitman," a poem which deals almost in its entirety with
this group. The first two verses present a sensual
conjecture:

Por el East River y el Bronx
los muchachos cantaban enseﬁando sus cinturas (118)

The image presented is one of freedom, of song, and of an

emancipation from the city of New York, and from all of

164

technological society by association. The masculine
figure of Walt Whitman, a native of the city, is
celebrated as well:
Ni un solo minute, Adan de sangre, macho
hombre solo en el mar, viejo hermoso Walt Whitman
(120), o o o
In these lines, the reader senses an enthusiastic
recognition or celebration both of Whitman's homosexuality
and his "masculine" poetry. From an exuberant description
which lauds Whitman, the poet passes to a series of verses
which absolve homosexuals from a list of actions and
customs that would ordinarily be condemned by the dominant
society:
Per see no levanto mi voz, viejo Walt Whitman,
contra el niﬁo que escribe
nombre de niﬁo en su elmohada:
ni contra el muchacho que se viste de novia
en la oscuridad del ropero:
ni contra los solitarios de los casinos
que beben con asco el agua de la prostitucion:
ni contra los hombres de mirada verde
que amen a1 hombre y queman sus labios en silencio.
Pero si contra vosotros, maricas de las ciudades
(124).
It should be noted in these verses, that a progression of
male figures is depicted. The poet begins by citing a
boy, then an adolescent, and finally adult men. This list
signals a form of universal suffering, caused by a society
which refuses to accept any person of any age who is
homosexual. And the first person narrative should again
be noted. This is the voice of the poet himself, raised

in a daring defense of one of the minorities most out of

favor with the dominant majority. For this reason, it is

165

natural that "Ode a Walt Whitman" should occupy this place
in the composition, because by placing it toward the end
of this narrative, it gives it a place of strategic
importance. The figurative struggle which has been
undertaken throughout much of this work between those with
power and the powerless reaches a cumulative climax in
this poem, wherein the society which has condemned and
ostracized this minority is destroyed, and the minority
most scorned by the society rises to a place of power,
laud, and glory. It is much reminiscent of Christ's
description of the after-life: "The exhalted will be
humbled, and the humble exhalted," and it was probably for
this reason as well that this Ode follows "Grito hacia
Roma," a poem in which the figures of the poor and
ostracized (as represented most notably in the personnage
of the leper) figure so prominently.

Having poetically "freed" the homosexual from the
oppression of the dominant society (with the exceptions of
those homosexuals whose sexual appetites dull their
capacity to love), the poem ends with the appearance of a
Black child, symbol of purity, and new life rising out of
the ruins of the former society:

y America as anega de méquinas y llanto.
Quiero que el airs fuerte de la noche mas honda
quits flores y letras del arco donde duermes,

y un niﬁo anuncie a los blancos de oro
la llegada del reino de la espiga (126).

The use of the first person 'quiero" in these verses

reinforces the link in the poet's mind between his

166

existence, and the oppressed in general. This is a verb
of individual will, but what he desires is also
fulfillment for the exploited masses of twentieth century
society. The black boy who announces the "reign of the
wheat" is the herald of a new regeneration of humankind,
with vital links to the earth and to Nature. The
innocence of a child epitomizes the poet's desire for a
return to more innocent and primordial values, which have
been rejected by a society whose monument is New York
City. This is not the same figure who, in the first poem
of the work, was paralyzed by the city so that he could do
little more than "let his hair grow," an involuntary
physical action, but rather, a confident and integrated
personality. His figurative death in a cold and
"geometric" American society has helped him to grow as a
human being, and having recognized this fact himself, the
poet takes leave of the city. He chronicles this
departure in the last three poems of the work.

A comparison of the final three poems in the work
with the initial three poems reveals a parallelism that
could only have been arranged by the poet himself. In

"Pequeﬁo vals vienés,’ the reader notices immediatley that
Lorca has reverted to a patterned assonant rhyme scheme in
direct contrast to the third poem of the work, "La

Aurora,‘ which is written in free verse. This attention
to pattern emphasizes the poet's return to a more

harmonious existence. But more importantly, there are

167

some images that have a direct relationship in the two
poems. The "aguas podridas" of New York are contrasted
with the image of a "head of a river" in "Pequeﬁo vals
vienés." The "nardos de angustia dibujada" in "Aurora"
have metamorphosed into "fotografias y azucenes." And the
often disputed verse, "Dejaré mi boca entre tus piernas"
can be best understood if we refer to the verses in "La
Aurora, "La aurora llega y nadie 1a recibe en su boca."
In this context, the mouth is a source of nourishment and
life, and an important avenue for a return to nature, as
represented by the dawn, just as in these lines, the mouth
of the river is a return to nature:

En Viena bailaré contigo

con un disfraz que tenga

cabeza de rio

iMira qué orillas tengo de jacintos!

Dejaré mi boca entre tus piernas

mi alma en fotografias y azucenas

y en 1as ondas oscuras de tu anda

quiero amor mio amor mio dejar

violin y sepulcro, 1as cintas del vals (130).
The reference made is to the mouth of a river, and the
legs can be interpreted as figurative riverbanks. The
return to nature is implied in the use of the mouth of a
river, which flows into the sea. Contrary to the
assumption that this is a highly erotic reference (28),
the image is one which is very consistent if contrasted
with the "agua podrida" of "La Aurora." Furthermore, in

"La Aurora,’ the image of a "living death appears: "Per
los barrios hay gentes que vacilan insomnes/ come recien

salidas de un naufragio de sangre (26)." This is in

168

direct contrast to the verse in "Vienés:" "En Viena hay
diez muchachas/Un hombre donde sollaza la muerte (128)."
The verse presents a death vanquished, and as this poem
continues, the victory has been brough about by love.

In the second poem of the composition, "Febula y

rueda de los tres amigos,‘ Lorca has written a "round," in
which three friends from his adolescent years are
recalled. The circumstances and descriptions of their
lives are described in negative imagery, as noted earlier.
In the second to the last poem of the work, the "round" is
now a waltz, "Vals en las ramas." The opening verses:

Cayé una hoja

y dos

y tres (130).
are highly reminiscent of the first verses of the "Fabula:"

Enrique

Emilio

Lorenzo (26).
and those which follow later in the poem:

Tres

y dos

y uno (28),
and since these three friends met unhappy fates, they
could be said to have "fallen" like the leaves of the
second to the last poem. This structural relationship is

reinforced by an inordinate number of parallelisms in

imagery and symbol. For example, "el mar," "la hormiga,"

"La luna," "la nieve,‘ "La paleme,’ and "e1 tabaco“ all
appear in both poems. What is different in the two poems,

and appropriately so, if the narrative progression of ﬁg:

169

is considered, is the tone of the poems. In "Fébula," the
poet appears to be reminiscing, and the poem has a strong
nostalgic quality diffused throughout its verses, but in
contrast, in "Vals en las ramas," these verses appear:

Llegara un torso de sombre

coronado de laurel.

Sera el cielo para el viento

duro como una pared (132)
This shadowy and victorious torso may be interpreted as
the poet himself. The use of the verb "ear" in the future
indicates that he is now looking towards his future, which
stands in marked contrast with his nostalgic backward
glances in "Fébula y rueda de los tres amigos."

The first poem of this work was, as Richard Predmore
has noted, not so much a poem about New York as a poem
about the inner anguish and mental suffering of the poet
himself (30). In it, the protagonist is a man "out of

control,’ who desperately seeks a sense of equilibrium in
the urban metropolis. He was nothing more than an entity,
lost in a city which he portrayed in a series of negative
images. Even in the one instance where the first person
verb form is used, it is, as mentioned, used in the

'

context of a man "gone limp,’ and paralyzed by the city so
that the only thing that he can do, grow his hair, is
really an action over which he has no control. But in the
final poem of the work, "Son de los negros en Cuba," the

first person is used to communicate a thoroughly distinct

mental state. When Lorca writes, "Iré a Santiago," his

170

"post" is new in control of his own actions. His "flight

from the city,’ as he calls it, is not a flight of fear,
but rather, a willful decision to turn his back on a city
of which he now takes leave while awaiting the advent of
his prophetic visions involving a return to nature, and
the rise of the "reign of the wheat." The "arbol de

muﬁones que no canta,‘ of the first poem is now replaced

by "teches de palmera [que] cantaran." The "mariposa

ahogada en el tintero,‘ has metamorphosed into "El mar

ahogado en la arena, the former image conveying death,
and the latter representing the natural life rhythms to be
found in the waves of the sea as they break over the sand.

"Las formas que buscan e1 cristal,’ and all of those who
dwell in the glass and cement canyons of New York, have
been left behind, and the poet finds in Cuba "bovine
frescor de caﬁaveras!" The poet's return to life and to
the ebb and flow of a wholesome Nature have refreshed him,
and he rejects "1as formas que van hacia la sierpe (an
image which may in this case represent the subway, rows of
glass windows along the New York avenues, or, possibly the
enticements of the "Devil"), and finds in Cuba a more
positive serpentine image: "iOh Cuba! iOh curba de
suspiros y barre!" The serpentine imagery which the poet
discovers in the "curve" of Cuba, as opposed to that of
"Vuelta de passe" represents a land of human and emotional

stability and contentment (los suspiros) and is linked to

Nature and the Earth (barre). The post, then, is no

171

longer a captive in a "city of multiplications," but a
lively and sensual being. He is now completely in control
of his life and of his actions. This control can be
discerned in the following verses, where the natural and
sensual elements of Cuba are interwoven with references to
his own will recovered:

iOh Cuba! 30h ritmo de semillas secas!

Iré a Santiago.

iOh cintura caliente y gota de madera!

Iré a Santiago.

Arpa de troncos vives. Caiman. Flor de tabaco.

Iré a Santiago.

Siempre he dicho que yo iria Santiago

en un coche de agua negra (134)
The contrast between the verse "dejaré crecer mis
cabellos," and "Ire a Santiago" can only be fully
comprehended having followed the protagonist of Pﬂl's
inner developments through a reading of the "plot"
narrative of the work as a whole. The imagery he uses in
these verses are images of potency and potential. The
seeds and the "burning waist" both cell to mind sexual
potency, and potential life. The "caimén" of these verses
is a reference to the Black race, which, as demonstrated
earlier, Lorca perceived as the heralds of a new age.

This contrast of the three initial and the three
final poems of the work has been necessary in order to
point out the great lengths to which Lorca went in order
to assure that this composition ended a circular narrative

with a complete closure. As the reader "entered" the work

in the first three poems, he encountered rhythmic and

172
rhyme schemes that were deliberately used in order to set
a tone. The poetic devices which Garcia Lorca used to
bring a closure to the work were the same, although he
used different, more orderly ones in order to communicate
a more orderly denouement. And of course, as already
mentioned, the use of such an extensive series of parallel
images and symbols in these poems was not foruitous. But
the images presented in the first three poems, be they
serpent, or water, etc. have taken on completely novel
connotations in the mind of the reader, largely because
they have been witness to a narrative chronicle which
deformed, refracted, and added new meaning to the dynamic
plot as each poem was read.

As can be seen in the above outline of “plot," or
histoire of 2N1, the narrative is highly structured. This
narrative structure, which serves fundamentally to enhance
the "histoire" is the final aspect of this work which
remains to be scrutinized. It is through the vehicle of
narrative voice, the tool which Lorca employed to add
substance and force to the "plot" of PNY, that the
sophisticated "discours" element of the

work may be discerned.

There is a duality of narration in these poems, which
generally shifts from the first to third person. Often
times, since Lorca created a protagonist ("poeta")--
antagonist (the city) relationship, the schism creates an

element of tension, a "me—egainst~the-world" challenge.

173

In order to make clearer the intricate relationship
between the themes of the poems, analyzed earlier, and the
narrative voice employed, it is helpful to first reduce
each poem to its matrix, a term advanced by Michael
Riffaterre in his literary criticism, which affords the
reader the opportunity to derive a central "message" from
a poem, which is, in effect, what the poem "says" again
and again, in a variety a manners. The matrix is a
subtextual foundation upon which the poem expands as it
unfolds. Riffaterre writes:

The poem results from the transformation of the
matrix, a minimal and literal sentence, into a
longer, complex, and non~literal periphresis.
The matrix is hypothetical, being only the
grammatical and lexical articulation of a
structure. The matrix may be epitomized in one
word, in which case the word will not appear in
the text. . . . The poem's significance, both
as a principal of unity and as the agent of
semantic indirection, is produced by the detoug
the text makes as it runs the gauntlet of
mimesis, moving from representation to
representation (. . .) with the aim of
exhausting the paradigm of all possible
variations on the matrix. The harder it is to
force the reader to notice the indirection and
to lead him step by step through distortion away
from mimesis, the longer the detour must be and
the more developed the text (31).

The matrix as advanced by Riffaterre offers a useful
way of simplifying what could otherwise be an extremely
unwieldy and complicated task, that of comparing theme to
narrative voice in order to see how the narrative voice
enhances the theme. Before preceding to this final

analysis, the following list will assist in simplifying

the narrative/thematic relationship. The title of each

174

poem is listed first, then the matrix of each, and
finally, the narrative voice which Lorca employed to
narrate each poem will be elaborated, and will appear as
either "first," "second" or "third" person. A discussion
of this relationship follows the list.

Vuelta de passe
Disorientation and solitude in the city
First person

1910, Intermedio
Loss of innocence and state of well-being
First person

La Aurora
The city destroys nature and corrupts humans.
Third person

Fabula y rueda de los tres amigos
Reminiscences of adolescent friends
First person

Tu infancie en Menton
Melancholy reminiscence of early childhood
First person

Norma y paraiso de los negros
The black race and culture are "out of their element" in the city.
Third person-~ellos

El rey de Harlem
The Black culture has a proud heritage
Third person/—-ellos last verses, first person

Iglesia abandonada (Balada ds la gran guerra)
There is a struggle to come between "good" and "evil."
First person/third person

Danza de la muerte
Prediction of a black take-over of the city
First person, third person

Paiseje de la multitud que vomita (Anochecer de Coney Island)
New York corrupts human value.
First person

Paiseje de la multitud que orina (Nocturno de Batterey Place)
New York kills the human spirit.
Third person-—ellos/Uds.

175

Asesinato (Dos veces de madrugada en Riverside Drive)
Figurative murder of the "poet”
Third person, last verse-—first person

Navidad en el Hudson
Loss of religious faith in the city
Third person/first person

Ciudad sin sueﬁo (Nocturno del Brooklyn Bridge)
Prediction of the resurgence of Nature
First person

Panorama ciego de Nueva York
Spiritual source of power is Nature
third person—ellos/first person-—yo, nosotros

Nacimiento de Cristo
Birth death are intricately linked.
Third person

Poema doble del Lego Edem
Desire for happiness and fulfillment in life
First person

Cielo vivo
Recognition that desires are not always fulfilled
First person

El Niﬁo Stanton
Child threatened with loss of innocence/maturation
First, third, second person

Vaca
Death is real and bloody~~not abstraction
third person—~é1, ella

Niﬁa ahogada en un pozo (Granada y Newburgh)
The worst form of death is stasis
Second person/first person

Muerte
Humans waste their lives being dissatisfied
Third person—~ellos, first person--yo

Nocturne del hueco
Perspective on afterlife-~a vacuum
Second person——tﬁ, first person—-YO

Paiseje con dos tumbas y un perro asirio
Cemetery setting is bleak and erie.
Second person-—command--"levantate./first person-~yo

176

Ruina
Love is stronger than the grave.
First person—~yo, (tu)=nosotros

Luna y panorama de los insectos, poema de amor

Love is the force which "rehumanizes" and rescues Nature from
destruction in the cityscape.

First person-~yo, (tﬁ)=nosotros

Nueva York (Oficina y denuncie)
Condemnation of the lifestyle of the city
First person~—Yo

Cementerio judio
The dominant groups will lose their power.
Third person-~ellos

Crucifixion
Evil deeds of the power abusers will "turn" on them
Third person—~ellos

Grito hacia Roma, desde la torre del Chrysler Building
Hypocricy and abuse of power by the Pope
First person (addressing "tu"), Third person——ellos (los negros)
Oda a Walt Whitman
A new and just world order is to come
Third person, first person (addressing "to", Walt Whitman)
Pequeﬁo vals vienés
Impressions on departing from New York
First person, third person—~ellos
Vals en las ramas
Poet ponders own psychic recovery
First person——yo
E1 poeta llega e la Habana
The poet leaves the city——he is in control and renewed
First person—-yo

Lorca has created a protagonist/antagonist
relationship in the first four poems of the composition.
This is the preparatory "stage setting" in which we find
the poet lost and alienated, and the tension narrated by

the use of the first and third persons riddles all four

poems. Even the two which are escapist in their

177
"flashback" natures are imbued with this tension. The
protagonist who narrates these poems is not simply
reminiscing for the pleasure of it, but rather, he is
desperately trying to escape the reality in which he finds
himself in the American metropolis.

"Norma y paraiso de los negros" is narrated in the
third person plural, since it deals with the Black race.
But in the following poem, "El rey de Harlem," the
narrator interjects his own voice, and the poem is divided
into two portions. The "King" of Harlem and his people
(ellos), are, toward the end of the poem, joined by the
post now narrating in the first person. It is here that
the first appearance of an attempt to identify the poet
with the Black race is seen in the narrative voice itself.

In "Iglesia abandonada (Balada de la gran guerra),"
Lorca has employed an innovative and unique narrative
technique. The poem is narrated at the beginning in the
first person, "Yo tenia un hijo," and ends in the third
person, "E1 tenia un hijo." This merging of the first and
third persons is, on the thematic level, significant for
two reasons. It demonstrates the poet's loss of identity,
and at the same time, can be reflective of the ambiguity
of the Christian Trinity. Since this poem, the first one
of a religious nature in the composition, deals with the
religious theme, this interpretation assists in
explicating this rather ambiguous narrative.

"Danza de la muerte" is narrated in the third person

178

(Negros), but toward the end of the poem, just as in "El

rey de Harlem,‘ Lorca mingles the voice of his post, with
that of the Blacks through the use of both the first and
third persons. And just as in el "Rey de Harlem," this
has the effect of making an identification with and a
linkage between the "poet" of the narrative, and the
oppressed Black minority.

In "Paisaje de la multitud que vomita (Anochecer de

Coney Island),' there is a description presented, in the
third person of "ellos," the unhealthy products of the
urban metropolis. The "mass man" is described in detail,
and the third person narration serves to drive a wedge
between the poet, and these people. This linguistic
distancing on the part of the post from the masses of New
York (and his subsequent stats of isolation which is the
result of this distancing), continues in the following
poem, also narrated in the third person, entitled,
"Paisaje de la multitud que orina (Nocturno de Batterey
Place)."

"Asesinato (Dos veces de madrugada en Riverside
Drive) is narrated in the first person. Lorca juxtaposes
a third person description of his "poet's" figurative
death with the poet's own forlorn first person cry, "iAy,
ay de mi!". This cry of total despair forges the way for
the next poem of the work, "Navidad en el Hudson," a poem,

which, as has already been discussed, deals both with the

emptiness and hollowness of the Manhattan Christmas, and

179
with the true value of love as represented by the birth.
It is narrated in the first person.

In "Ciudad sin sueﬁo (Nocturno del Brooklyn Bridge),"
the poet narrates in the first person, and then issues a
warning to the inhabitants of the city, "Alerta, alerta,
alerta! [La vida no es un susﬁo!" It is a warning for the
inhabitants to face reality, and to recognize the
hollowness of their lifestyles.

"Panorama ciego de Nueva York" follows, and in it,
Lorca mixes first person narration with the second
appearance of first person plural narration: "Nosotros
ignoramos que el pensamiento tiene arrabales. . . que
sabian pronunciar la palabra amor." At this point in the
composition, the poet has discovered the key which will
enable him, in the poems which follow, to elaborate on the
theme of love. It is a love based upon identification and
solidarity with the dominated peoples, and for this
reason, the first person plural narrative voice will
become more and more important and common in the poems
which follow. As already mentioned, this discovery of
"love" and its power is made at a crucial juncture in the
narration, because it is followed directly by "Nacimiento
de Cristo." The connection is obvious. This poem is
narrated in the third person, becasue it chronicles an
historical event, and in the final verses, a tremendous
condemnation is hurled by the post at "ellos," the

"sacerdotss idiotas" who fail to realize the significance

180
of the event.

The bucolic poems of respite and meditation which
continue this narration create a thematic and structural
parenthesis, and they are narrated, for the most part (as
could be expected) in the first person. In "El niﬁo
Stanton," there is a direct dialogue between the poet, and
the youth Stanton. The poet's interchange with the
innocent young child represents a form of identification
with him. There is a chilling omnipresent narrative voice
in this poem which sees the evils which await Stanton as
he grows older, and through which the maturation process
is equated with death.

The brutality of death is the matrix of "Vaca." This
poem is narrated in the third person, because it
chronicles the butchery of a cow which is "sacrificed" to
feed the masses of the city. This third person narration
creates a sense of detachment, and contrasting with
previous poems, the poet's own "frightened" voice does not
appear.

This is perhaps the first indication that the poet
recognizes that a self-sacrifice may be necessary in
order to free the mass man of the city. With that
recognition, then, comes a sense of detachment, and almost
a sense of resignation. The poet is now able to look upon
death, and to accept it as part of the natural order of
life. In "Niﬁa ahogada en un pozo (Granada y Newburgh),"

the third person narration of the first part of the poem

181

is interrupted by the poet's own words, "Mientras la gente
busca silencios de tu almohada, to lates para siempre
definida en tu anillo (82)." These words, or musings of
the poet directed at the "dead" child constitute a
recognition that death is not the final state of human
existence.

"La muerte" occupies an important location in the
work, because it follows the poems of bucolic distancing
from the city. Narrated in the first person, the poet
describes himself as a "seraphim," now freed from
earthly concerns.

The poems which follow "La muerte" are, for the most
part, narrated in the first person. "Nocturno del Hueco,"
"Paisaje con dos tumbas y un perro asirio," and "Luna y
panorama de los insectos" are dominated by the poet's
first person narration. In these three poems, a
progression is followed through which the poet, having
"died," is given new life throught the force of love.
This new found strength enables the poet in "New York:
Oficina y denuncie" to "stand up" to the urban "monster"
and to fear it no more. It is for this reason that this
poem is one in which the first person singular dominates.
In "Cementerio judio," as already mentioned, the
hypocritical practitioners of rigid but malevolent dogmas
are singled out for some of the harshest condemnations in
the composition. The third person plural narration of

this poem lends emphasis to the poet's lack of affinity

182

with this group. These people are given the specific
title of the "Pharisees" in the following poem,
"Crucifixion," and since there really is no subject
change between this poem and the previous one, the
narrative is still in the third person. These are the
"antagonists" of Egl. And the divison "yo—ellos" which
characterizes this composition is strongly present in
these poems.

It is in "Grito hacia Roma (desde la Torre del
Crysler Building)" that a narrative coup of sorts occurs.
The third person singular narration of the Pope's "selling
out" to Benito Mussolini through the signing of the Treaty
of Leteranse at first is directly related to the previos
poem, "Crucifixion," a poem which, as does this one, deals
with religious hypocrisy. But in the final verses of the
poem, the narrative voice metamorphoses into a first
person plural cry for liberation and human rights:

"Porque queremos e1 pan nuestro de cada dia (118)." The
idea of human rights and liberation is then carried over
in "Ode a Walt Whitman," which is narrated in the first
person. It is an encomium of Whitman, but more
importantly, it is a poem which interrelates almost all of
the major themes which have appeared previously: love,
oppression, mechanized society, and abuses of power. But
the first person narration is no longer related in the
voice of an inhibited and panicking voice. This voice is

strong and self assured.

183

The last three poems are all narrated in the first
person. These three occupy the "denouement" section of
the composition, in which the poet, having recovered his
strength, takes leave of the city. The repetition and
simplicity of all three poems bears witness to the calming
which has taken place after the culminating climax of

"Grito hacia Roma,’ and "Ode a Walt Whitman."
The "discours" elements in this composition are
plainly evident. The poet has mingled and refracted his
narrations in order to convey to the best of his ability
the series of messages and themes which appear in the
work. From a panicking first person narrative of the
first poem of the work, we move to a lengthy series of
third person narration, which elaborates the antagonists
of the city. Then, there is a meditative and calmer
return to the first person, as the poet figuratively
"sacrifices himself" for his fellows. Having done so, his
voice is swelled by the multitudes of the oppressed which
he has hoped to "save" through his sacrifice, and finally,
satisfied, he leaves the city alone, a solitary "yo"
figure, whom the reader differentiates from the "yo" of
the first poem by the new tone of self—assurance and self—
control. The recovered volition of the poet is
communicated in the refrain, repeated time and again in

"Sen de los negros en Cuba, "Ire a Santiago, iré a
Santiago."

This remarkable use of narrative voice is reminiscent

184
of some of the greatest twentieth century novelists, such
as William Faulkner and Luis Martin Santos, each of whom
employed a complex and sometimes ambiguous series of
narrators in their texts in order to convey their meaning
in a more profound manner. It can be said, perhaps, that
Lorca, in this work, anticipated some of the new and less
rigid narrative styles which were to come. His use of a
carefully ordered narrative structure, and a polished
series of narrative voices add rich dimensions to the work
as a whole.

Both narrative voice and plot structure in Lorca's New
York poetry must be recognized before the work itself can
be fully appreciated. Scholars in years past, having
neglected this element of the work, have been unable to
interpret it except at the most superficial of levels.
Many, we now know mistakenly, dismissed the work as one of
Lorca's poorest and enigmatic. But today, others are
beginning to recognize the work for what it is: one of
Garcia Lorca's most outstanding poetic compositions.

Lorca himself certainly perceived it to be so. In a letter
to his family from New York, he wrote:
Yo trabajo bastante. Escribo un libro de poemas
de interpretaciones de Nueva York que produce
enorme impresion a estos amigos por su fuerza.
Yo creo que todo lo mio resulta palido al lado
de estas cosas, que son an cierta manera

sinfonicas, como s1 ruido y la complejidad
neoyorquinos (32).

 

For many years critics were distressed by the "discordant"

and harsh sounds of PNY. But they were overlooking the

185

vital fact which Lorca mentions above that if he were to
go about capturing the sights, sounds, smells, feelings,
and taste of the American metropolis, then its underlying
structure, as well as the images, had to be, by necessity,
enigmatic, complex, and confusing. And it should not be
overlooked that this poetry was meant to be read aloud, as
Lorca often did at his poetry recitals. The wealth of
tones and intonations that could be placed on a potent

verse such as "asesinado por el cielo," or Ay, Harlem!"
is enormous. Roman Jakobson offers an observation which
can easily be applied to N

WW

A former actor of Stanislavskys’ Moscow Theatre
told me how at his audition he was asked by the
famous director to make forty differnet messages
from the phrase §egodrja vecerom "This evening"
by diversifying its expressive tint. He made a
list of some forty emotional situations, then
emitted the given phrase in accordance with each
of these situations, which his audience had to
recognize only from the changes in the sound
shape of the same two words (33).
The poems which comprise PNY offer a wealth of
opportunities for both critical and oral interpretations,
and certainly the circular narrative structure of the work
adds a vibrancy and a potency that evolves as the poems
are read in direct relation to each other. The dialectic
and metamorphosing nature of this work has made it an on~
going subject of critical study and aesthetic appreciation
for more than fifty years, because Lorca infused the work

with psychological and sociological concerns which concern

us every bit as much today as they did the people fifty

186
years ago.

Posts en Nueva York is a poetic composition which

 

chronicles one man's struggle in the modern world as well
as the struggle between the oppressed and the oppressers
in a materialistic society, and Lorca portrayed these
struggles in a highly innovative and stylized fashion.
Lorca most probably was aware that his words,
organized on paper into a series of poems, and fitted into
a coherent narrative structure, would attract as many
different interpretations as there were serious readers of
the work. Literary works which can be analyzed too easily
often become "old," dull, and unappreciated. Works such
as this one, which almost challenge the reader to a
struggle so that they may be more thoroughly understood
and appreciated are those which yield the most meaningful

and valuable messages of all.

NOTES

1. Ricardo Gullon, ”aHubo un surrealismo espaﬁol?,
in Su e is o realismos: Lat oamér c a ﬁ ,
Peter G. Earle and Germdn Gullon, eds. (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania, 1975), p. 127.

2. José Ortega, C n ncia oc a n tres ramas de
Ggrcia Lorca (Granada: Curso de Estudioe Hispenicos,
Universidad de Granada, 1981). p. 11.

3. Martin Fees, 5 b a ta her n
Experigncg (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska
Press, 1949), p. 125.

4. Carl Gustav Jung, d an in e r a Soul
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1933), pp.
170-1.

5. Juan Cano Ballesta, ter ura tecno a: s
letr es la a a r v 1 u 19 0- 9 3
(Madrid: Editorial Origenes, 8. A., 1981). PP. 232-3.

6. C. D. Morris, Ihg Dgeag Hogs: (Silegt Films and
ﬁpgnign Beets (n. c.: University of Hull, 1977), p. 17.

7. Juan Caballero, ”Garcia Lorca y Cuba: Algunas
Rectificaciones,” Gargia Lgrgg Reyigw VI, no. 1 (Spring
1978): 49.

8. Vicente Cabrera. ”Poetic Structure in Lorca's Lg
casa de Bgznardg Alba." Higpgnig, 61 (September 1978):

187

188
470.

9. Federico Garcia Lorca, La casg de Bgrnarga Albg,
Miguel Garcia Poseda, ed. (Madrid: Editorial Castalia,
1983), p. 50.

10. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The N ure of
Nggrgtive (New Oxford University Press, 1968), p.4.

11. Federico Garcia Lorca, Epigtolagig 11,
Christopher Maurer, ed. (Madrid: Editorial Alianza,
1983), p. 133.

12. Seymour Chatman, S o a is our e: r tiv
sggucture 1n Eiction gnd Film (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1978), p. 33.

13. , p. 31.

14. Umberto Eco, A Thegry of Segiotigs (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1976). p. 271. Robert Scholes,

 

using different terms, also comments on the importance of
the relationship author-narrator-reader: ”Similarly, in
poetry or fiction, we have almost invariably to consider
duplicity of sender and of receiver as well. There is a
sense in which a poem is a message sent to a reader,
perhaps you or me, by the poet, a person like ourselves.
But almost invariably this message is presented in the
form of someone not the poet addressing someone not
ourselves. . . .” Robert Scholes, r t r i
Literggure: An Ingzoguctiog (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1974), p. 28.

15. Culler writes, ”There are two answers to this

189
charge of reductionism, which doubtless will be frequently
leveled at ngiotics of Pogtry [Riffaterre's work].
First, Riffaterre makes it clear that the matrix is not
the meaning of the poem. To discover the matrix is to
unify the poem, but meaning, or significance (. . .), is
something else. The meaning of the poem is not the matrix
but the entire experience of moving from mimetic reading
to the pursuit of hypograms to the discovery of semiotic
unity.” Jonathan Culler, The Pgrggit of Sign; (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 92.

16. Andrew A. Anderson has established a biographical
link between the ”Emilio” of this poem, and the poet. He
writes: ”. . . the second friend, Emilio, has been
identified as the sculptor Emilio Aladr‘n, with whom Lorca
had an affair in the late 1920's, the end of which sparked
the emotional crisis of 1928-9." Andrew A. Anderson,
"Evolution," p. 224.

17. As has been mentioned previously, this poem was
unavailable to Humphries at the time that he was making
his translation. Most critics agree, however, that based
on its nostalgiac tone and thematic concerns, that this is
the correct placement of the poem within the composition
as the fourth poem of the work.

18. Miguel Garcia Poseda, "Introduccion, ' Federico
Garcia Lorca, szgg cgmpletgg, Miguel Garcia Poseda, ed.
(Madrid: Akal, 1982), p. 67.

19. Richard Saez, ”The Ritual Sacrifice in Lorca's

190

Eoeta en Nugvg Yorg,” in or a: Co lect o o C tica
Essayg, Manuel DurAn, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:

Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965). PP. 108-129.

20. Of the poem ”Iglesia abandonada," Halliburton
writes, ”But more importantly, a spiritual significance
can be seen in the poem which fits one of the general
themes of the book, that of the ineffectiveness of
Christianity in the modern world, or, better still, the
loss of Christ and the evasiveness of love in the
mechanical civilization." Virginia Halliburton, "The Son-
Christ Image in Eoeta gn Nueyg Ygrg." Garci. nggg
Revigw, No. 2 (1980), p. 11. Allen Josephs writes, "The
first thing we need to dispense with is any idea of
Christianity: Lorca is one of the least Christian poets
Spain has produced, not so much anti-Christian as non-
Christian. His skepticism goes beyond Unamuno's, and when
he mentions Christian themes, it is usually to provide
local color. He is, however, an extremely religious
writer, but, as Martinez Nedal has proved so well, he is
far more pantheistic than Christian.” Allen Josephs,
"Lorca and the Duende: Toward a Dionesian Concept of
Art." G c Lorc v w, 7, No. 2 (1979), p. 58.

21. The sense in which this mask is used in "Danza
de la muerte," is much reminiscent the the ways in which
masks were employed in primitive times. Jolande Jacobi
writes, "Hence in ancient Greece, masks were magical

instruments through which man could relate to the divine

| 1

(T

191

in uniqueness and the human collective with all its
terrors, to experience a transcendental oneness with those
powers. The mask was the exteriorization in concrete form
of the universally human archetypal background of the
soul, and symbolized the unification of the individual ego
with the hidden ancestors dwelling within him. They
bestow on the wearer of the mask a higher kind of being
with greatly increased power and freedom. For him who
wears the mask, all taboOs are abolished. He belongs to
the world of another order, and is, in this sense, free."
Jolande Jacobs, Masgs of the Soul (Grand Rapids: William
B. Eerdmane Publishing Company, 1976), p. 37.

22. Two informative studies which have been written
on the theme of death in Lorca's poetry are: Pedro
Salinas, "Lorca and the Poetry of Death," in nggg, Manuel
Durdn, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice—Hall, Inc.,
1965), pp. 100-7, and Ramon Xirau, "La relacion metal—
muerte en los poemas de Garcia Lorca," in Egdgrigo Ggrcia
Lgygg, Idelfonso-Manuel Gil, ed. (Madrid: Taurus
Ediciones, S. A., 1975). pp. 207—216.

23. Michael Riffaterre, Se 0 c e
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1978),
p. 49.

24. Richard Saez writes, "As with Christianity,
Judaism is merely a symbol (of materialism) for Lorca,
with no direct or restricted reference." Richard Saez,

"The Ritual Sacrifice in Lorca's Zoet 13 New York, in

192

Lorca, ﬂanuel Duran, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
Prentice—Hall, Inc., 1965), p. 123.

25. It should be pointed out as well that one of
Lorca's most well-known drawings is a depiction of severed
hands. Garcia Lorca, Obras gompletgs (Aguilar), p. 1251.

26. As mentioned in Chapter I, ”Crucifixion” is the
poem which Lorca was unable to obtain from a friend before
he turned the work over to Jose Bergemin. But most
critics, including Angel del Rio favor its placement in
the composition in this location. Angel del Rio,
"Introduction,” in Federico Garcia Lorca, Eggt in N1!
1g£_, Ben Belitt, trans. (New York: Grove Press, Inc.,
1955), p. xxiv.

27. Federico Garcia Lorca, Feet in New gork, Ben
Belitt, trans. (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1955). p.
108.

28. Cano Ballesta writes: ”Durante e1 mes de febrero
de 1930 la prensa neoyorquina y el ﬂew Iork 11mg. en
particular traen abundantee informaciones y alusiones a1
hecho trascendente de la firma de los acuerdos de Letrﬁn.
Recordemos que el 11 de febrero de 1929 el Secretario de
Estado Cardenal Gasparri, en nobre de Pio XI,. y el
dictador Benito Huseolini, entre e1 Jubilo de 1as
multitudes y las felicitaciones de numerosos Jefes de
estado, firmeban los Tratados de Letr‘n, por los que se
volvia a crear e1 Estado Pontificio deepu‘s de 60 aﬁos de

enemistad entre el Papado y es estado italiano. El Papa

193

volvia a ser un soberano indepediente en sus propios
dominios. A cambio de esta Pio XI daba a la dictadura
fascista de Mussolini una consagracién de resonancia
mundial. En el primer aniversario la prensa neoyorquina
se hizo amplio ecos de estos acontecimientos. E1 ﬂew Yon;
lime; escribia e1 7 de febrero 1930: 'Hace un aﬁo el Papa
era todavia ”e1 prisionero del Vaticano.” Hoy en virtud de
los acuerdos Lateranenses, firmados e1 11 de febrero de
1929, es un monarca libre e independiente en su propio
territorio. . . .'” (Juan Cano Ballesta, Litergturg y

t n l . p.219).

29. Richard Predmore, for example, interprets this
line in a sexual context. See Richard Predmore, Lgrgg's

w rk oet : c st c a k L v as F th
(Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1980), p. 71.

30. Predmore. p. 34.

31. Michael Riffaterre, o i f o
(Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1978), p.
19.

32. Federico Garcia Lorca, {pilgglggig_ll,
Christopher Mauerer, ed. (Madrid: Alianza Editorial,
1983), p. 137.

33. Roman Jakobson, ”Closing Statement: Linguistics
and Poetics,” in e i : Int 0 c r n o o ,
Robert B. Innis, ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press, 1985), p. 151.

CONCLUSION

This study systematically analyzes several aspects of
Garcia Lorca's masterpiece, o ta N v . A
discussion of the profound and rapidly changing world
order of his times, with regards to both political/social
concerns, as well as the various artistic currents in
vogue during the poet's lifetime, was a necessary
prerequisite in fixing this work in its proper artistic
and historical contexts.

As demonstrated in the "Introduction,” Lorca, in £ﬂ_,
shared the innovations of the early surrealists, but he
did not follow their literary explorations into the realm
of the oniric, or spontaneous poetic creation as
exemplified in automatic writing. Rather, it should be
stressed that 351 was a carefully conceived and
meticulously constructed work which often drew upon
surrealist innovations, such as the "fortuitous encounters
of unrelated images,” in order to portray a very Egg; (as
opposed to surreal) vision of the world in his poetry.

Since the narrative structure of this dynamic work
was the main focus of this study, a chapter was dedicated
to advancing a workable solution to the polemic concerning
the ”correct” edition of E!_. In view of the evidence

presented by those scholars who undertook the careful

194

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195

research necessary for a resolution of this issue, it can
be asserted that the 1940 Humphries/Norton bilingual
edition is the one most representative of the ”last
intents" of the post.

Thematic concerns, which are emphasized so forcefully
in the composition, had to be carefully considered in this
study as well, because the author has conscientiously
linked its content with its form and structure. The
principle themes of the work, love, death, and oppression,
with all of their inherent political and social overtones
were enhanced by Lorca's innovative-and revolutionary-
techniques employed to relate this narrative chronicle.

It may be stated with certainty that Lorca's private
evolving political and social views, with their insistence
on individual liberty and their concerns for the oppressed
of the world, are embodied in his daring literary
innovations in 231. It has already been detailed how
Lorca spoke out daringly, at a time when that
outspokenness was unwelcome by many in the world —-on
behalf of some of the most oppressed minorities of the
epoch. GermAn Gullén stresses that Lorca’s poetry
reflected this political and social personal evolution:

La percepcion de Federico Garcia Lorca como el
poeta que mejor representa e1 espiritu
republicano espaﬁol no distorsiona 1a realidad
de la poesia de Lorca: al contrario, supone una
penetrante intuicidn en la significacidn de su
poesia. Esta bien contrarrestar el populismo de

Lorca con apreciaciones sobre la profundidad de
su poetics, pero no podemos negarle su puesto de

POOtC popular. Adills de serlo por el acento,

196

por el colorido, por el ritmo de sus versos, lo
fue por condensar en su poesia 1a evolucion del
sentir politico—social de su época, que emanando
de las fuentes adn claras del liberalismo
espaﬁol, vino a desembocar en un compromiso con
el pueblo espaﬁol (1).

This idea of "Spanish liberalism” to which Gullon refers
can be expanded upon even further. Lorca's concern for
the oppressed of his own country widened to include the
underprivileged and the oppressed of the entire world.
Juan Cano Ballesta offers some further perspectives on
PE}, and stresses the universal aspects of its thematic
content:
Lorca no pierde oportunidad, como hemos notado
en varias ocasiones, para denunciar el poder
opresivo del dinero, el oro, la caJa de
caudales. El enfrentamiento entre civilizacion
tecnologica y naturaleza elemental ha venido a
convertirse en autentica lucha de clases en un
proceso dialectico en pleno dinamismo
traeformador, en que el opresor es el gran
capital, la tecnologia, el hombre blanco, y las
victimas e1 obrero, el hombre natural y
primitivo, el negro, la naturaleza vegetal y
animal (2).

A careful reading of the New York poetry, makes it
virtually impossible to deny that Garcia Lorca was
profoundly concerned with the ”class struggle” mentioned
by Cano Ballesta. New York City provided a catalyst for
the poet through which he could elaborate some of his
political and social concerns. The following words are
those of the poet, spoken at a gonfgggngig—rggital
delivered in Barcelona in 1932:

El cielo ha triunfado del rascacielos, pero

ahora, 1a arquitectura de Nueva York se me
parece como algo prodigioso, algo que descartada

197

la intencion, llega a conmover como un
espectaculo natural de montaﬁa o desierto. El
Chrysler Building se defiende del sol como un
enorme pico de plats, y puentes, barcos,
ferrocarriles y hombres los veo encadenados y
sordos, encadenados por un sistema econémico
cruel al que pronto habra que cortar el cuello,
y sordos por sobra de disciplina y falta de la
imprescindible dosis de locura (3).
These words contain an enormous condemnation of the
American, and global capitalist economic system, as Lorca
perceived it during his own times. And as already
mentioned, his radical poltical views were reflected in
parallel fashion in his literary creation.

The innovative structuring of his New York poetry has
been the primary focus of this study. Through the careful
ordering of the poems into a poetic narrative, Lorca
created a ”narrator” whose voice conducts the reader from
one poem to another in an ever-transforming, mutating, and
evolving discourse. PNY is a narrated chronicle, with a
clear autobiographical element. It possesses an
identifiable ”plot,” and both a protagonist and
antagonists. It must be read in this light if its full
impact is to be perceived and felt by the reader. when
this aspect of the work is analysed in detail, it becomes
evident that any one poem from the work, read out of
context from the composition as a whole, will not yield
its full aesthetic qualities. Each poem builds from
previous ones, and enhances those which follow it. The

narrative voice of one poem, or its thematic concerns or

images and metaphors, cannot be fully comprehended or

198

appreciated until the carefully ordered narrative

structure of the work as a whole is considered. It has
been the purpose of this study to analyze and elaborate
upon this important element of Garcia Lorca's Poet; on

Nugva York, largely overlooked until now by Lorca

scholars.

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