We welcome back Victor and his informative editorials, encompassing Lorca, picking up where he left off. Victor formerly composed an article indicating the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and how it became a defining moment for Lorca, amending his poetic focus toward a more politically fueled perception. This new commentary will feature corroborations of Lorca’s political outlook within his compositions.

Want to find out more about Lorca, including his poetic masterpieces and more of his life anecdotes? Then check out Victor's blog for more!

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[ Pictured above: Benito Mussolini with Papal envoy
Cardinal Gasparri after signing the Lateran Pact in February 1929. ]

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Without going into great detail (as I will in future installments), suffice it to say that fierce controversies still rage in Spain over the circumstances of Lorca’s assassination, and the hottest points of debate concerns the poet’s political sympathies, or lack thereof. Leftists claim him as a “fellow-traveler” and martyr to the progressive cause, the fascists maintain (as did Dalí) that he was completely apolitical and his death an act of personal vengeance, and both sides use their version as a propaganda weapon in the ongoing “Culture Wars.”

It seems to me, however, that the best way to get to know Lorca is from his own words. Although he adamantly refused to formally identify himself as any kind of “-ist” and never joined any political party, interview quotes such as this one from early 1936:

The world is detained by the hunger that destroys the people. While there is economic imbalance, the world can’t think… The day hunger disappears there will be a spiritual explosion in the world greater than Humanity has ever known. Never before has man been able to conceive of the happiness that will burst forth on the day of the Great Revolution. I’m talking like a real Socialist, aren’t I?

At first glance they seem incontrovertibly leftist. Fascists would argue, however, that like Hitler’s National Socialist Party in Germany, Franco and the Falangistas were initially Marxists, and that the “Grand Revolution” Lorca mentions was in fact the one they began just six months later, and in the initial chaos of which he was killed.

If only Lorca had spoken out publicly and specifically against Fascism itself, we might know for surewhere his sympathies lie!

As it happens, he did, not once but several times, beginning with another wrathful howl from the back of PINY –Grito hacia Roma (desde la torre del Chrysler Building)(“Cry toward Rome {from the Tower of the Chrysler Building}”). While introducing the piece during readings, he specified that it had been written in reaction to the news that the Pope had signed the Lateran Pact with Benito Mussolini, effectively linking arms the fascist dictator and helping to solidify his stranglehold over Italy.

Cry toward Rome {from the Tower of the Chrysler Building}

Apples barely wounded
by fine, silver rapiers,
clouds torn apart by a coral hand
that carries a fiery almond on its back,
arsenic fish like sharks,
sharks like wailing drops that blind the multitudes,
roses that wound
and needles installed in the blood’s plumbing,
enemy worlds and loves covered with worms
will fall on you. Will fall on the great dome
that anoints the military tongues with oil,
where a man pisses on a dazzling dove
and spits chewed-up coal
surrounded by thousands of little bells.

Because there is no one to bestow the bread or the wine,
or cultivate grace in the mouths of the dead,
or open the linen of restfulness,
or weep for the wounds of the elephants.
There are only a million blacksmiths
forging chains for tomorrow’s children.
Only a million carpenters
who make coffins without crosses.
Only a crowd of laments
that open their clothes, waiting for the bullets.
The man who scorns the dove should have spoken,
should have screamed naked between the columns,
and injected himself with leprosy
and let out a cry terrible enough
to dissolve his rings and his diamond telephones.
But the man dressed in white
knows nothing of the mystery of the wheat,
nor the moans of the woman giving birth,
nor that christ can still give water,
nor that money burns the prodigy’s kiss
and gives the blood of the lamb to the pheasant’s idiot beak.

The teachers show the children
a marvelous light coming from the mountain;
but what arrives is a junction of sewers
where the obscure nymphs of cholera scream.
The teachers point with devotion to the enormous incense-filled domes;
but beneath the statues there is no love,
there is no love beneath the definitive crystal eyes.
Love is in the flesh shredded by thirst,
in the tiny hut that fights against the flood:
love is in the pits where the serpents of hunger battle,
in the sad sea that floats gulls cadavers
and in the darkest kiss bristling beneath pillows.
But the old man with translucent hands
will say: Love, love, love,
acclaimed by millions of the dying;
he will say: Love, love, love,
amidst the gold lamé trembling with tenderness;
he will say: Peace, peace, peace,
among the shivering of knives and melons of dynamite;
he will say: Love, love, love,
until his lips have turned silver.

Meanwhile, yes, meanwhile
the blacks who empty spittoons,
the boys who tremble beneath the pallid terror of executives,
the women who drown in mineral oil,
the multitudes of hammers, violins or clouds,
they’ll scream even if they bash their brains against the wall,
scream in front of the domes,
scream driven crazy by fire,
scream driven crazy by snow,
scream with their heads full of excrement,
scream as if all the nights converged,
scream with such a heartrending voice
that the cities trembled like little girls
and knock down the prisons of oil and music.
Because we demand our daily bread,
alder blossom and perennially harvested tenderness,
because we demand that Earth’s will be done,
that its fruits be given to everyone.

Beginning with a passage reminiscent of Marx’ denunciation of religion as “the opiate of the masses,” Lorca predicts a revolution:

Sharks like wailing drops that blind the multitudes,
roses that wound
and needles installed in the blood’s plumbing,
enemy worlds and loves covered with worms
will fall on you. Will fall on the great dome
that anoints the military tongues with oil

He goes on to lament that “there is no one to bestow the bread or wine,” because “the old man in white” is too busy lining up “a million blacksmiths, forging chains for tomorrow’s children.” Faced with the terrible hunger and suffering in the world

The man who scorns the dove should have spoken,
should have screamed naked between the columns,
and injected himself with leprosy
and let out a cry terrible enough
to dissolve his rings and his diamond telephones.

But instead he just mutters empty mantras of love and peace “amidst the shivering of knives and melons of dynamite.”

In the final stanza of the poem, Lorca evokes the day when the oppressed of the world (specifically the blacks, women, and gays) will rise up and

scream with such a heartrending voice
that the cities trembled like little girls
and knock down the prisons of oil and music.

And he ends with a bitingly Socialist-tinged take on an ancient poem with which the Pope should be very familiar:

Because we demand our daily bread,
alder blossom and perennially harvested tenderness,
because we demand that Earth’s will be done,
that its fruits be given to everyone.

Not bad for a guy “without a political bone in his body.”

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Read the complete collection of Victor's Editorial Series:

Introduction

Anda Jaleo

The Censorship of Lorca

Childhood Memories

Lorca AKA Capdepón

How to Get a Law Degree Without Trying

Rehearsing Death

The Gypsy Ballads

Poet in New York, Part 1

King of Harlem

Double-Vision in Vermont

The Seemingly Tragic Tale of Little Stanton and Mary Hogan

The Divine Dalí’s Hole

Wall Street Comes Tumbling Down

Ode to Walt Whitman

Lorca Sings for Salty Seamen

Cry to Rome

Theatrical Revolution

Lorca Gone Wilde!

Robert and Were Really in Love!

Will the Real Putrefacto Please Stand Up?

The Puppet Tugs Its Pull

La Barraca

Three Breakthrough Plays of Feminine Oppression

Rafael Rodríguez Rapún and Sonnets of Dark Love

Death of a Poet

Comments

Natalie

0

 

 

You guys really rule.
I am from Ethiopia and also now am reading in English, tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "China's household into the wto expected the money of nearby advanced makers however buying their long dissatisfaction and assets."

THX :D, Natalie.

Thursday 03 September 2009, 15:58

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