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| Federico García Lorca |
The identity of the lover to whom Federico García Lorca wrote passionate verse in his final year has been a mystery ever since the poet's assassination during the Spanish civil war. But now, more than 70 years later, his name has finally emerged.
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| Federico García Lorca |
Eight-line poem found on the back of a manuscript sheds light on Spanish poet’s preoccupation with time
A previously unknown verse attributed to Federico García Lorca has been discovered 93 years after the celebrated Spanish poet and playwright is believed to have jotted it on the back of one of his manuscripts.
Lorca is thought to have written the eight-line poem in 1933 while working on the collection Diván del Tamarit, a homage to the Arab poets of his native Granada.
The newly discovered verse was found on the reverse of a manuscript of one of the Tamarit poems – Gacela de la raíz amarga – which the flamenco singer and Lorca enthusiast Miguel Poveda bought from a German antiquarian.
It has since been verified by the Lorca expert Pepa Merlo and will feature in a forthcoming book.
The brief verse, composed three years before Lorca was murdered in the early days of the Spanish civil war, reveals the poet’s familiar preoccupation with the passing of time: “The clock sings / I count the hours mechanically / Seven o’clock; twelve o’clock / It’s all the same / I am not here / It is the mark of flesh / That I left behind when I departed / So as to know my place / Upon my return.”
Poveda, who recently led efforts to turn Lorca’s childhood home into a cultural centre dedicated to the poet’s life and work, said he had been deeply moved by the fortuitous discovery.
“My attention was grabbed when Pepa Merlo said to me, ‘That’s Federico’s handwriting. You’ve got something new by Federico there’,” he told the state broadcaster TVE on Thursday.
“For me, it’s a heartfelt gift. It’s all there in those lines, ‘It is the mark of flesh / That I left behind, when I departed / So as to know my place / Upon my return’.”
Merlo said that while the verse may have been overlooked because it was scribbled on the back of another work, it nonetheless revealed “the importance that the concept of time held for Lorca”.
The gay, progressive writer – whose works include Gypsy Ballads, Poet in New York, Blood Wedding, Yerma, and the House of Bernarda Alba – was shot by a rightwing death squad in August 1936, becoming perhaps the most prominent victim of Spain’s three-year civil war. His body has never been found and is thought to lie in a shallow grave at the bottom of a mountain slope near Granada.
Interest in Lorca has only grown as the centenary of his death draws near. Last summer, a facsimile edition of the poet’s homoerotic, anguished – and posthumously published – Sonnets of Dark Love was issued to bring the poems to a new readership.
Although long known to Lorca scholars, the sonnets had been hidden away by the poet’s family, who believed their tortured and sensual lines would taint his legacy and stir up old hatreds.
The newly discovered poem will be published in a book written by Poveda and Merlo titled Las cosas del otro lado. lo inédito en Federico García Lorca(Things from the Other Side: the Unpublished in Federico García Lorca).
Don't mention the children
by Michael Rosen
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| Illustration by Danielle Rhoda |
Getty ImagesTam O'Shanter is a rip-roaring tale of witches and alcohol, but it has hidden depths. On Burns Night this Sunday – and 235 years after the poem was published in 1791 – Scots everywhere may well be treated to a masterwork with a unique, universal appeal.
The other one, Borges, is the one things happen to. I wander around Buenos Aires, pausing perhaps unthinkingly, these days, to examine the arch of an entranceway and its metal gate. I hear about Borges in letters, I see his name on a roster of professors and in the biographical gazetteer. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typeface, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson’s prose. The other one likes the same things, but his vanity transforms them into theatrical props. To say that our relationship is hostile would be an exaggeration: I live, I stay alive, so that Borges can make his literature, and this literature is my justification. I readily admit that a few of his pages are worthwhile, but these pages are not my salvation, perhaps because good writing belongs to no one in particular, not even to my other, but rather to language and tradition. As for the rest, I am fated to disappear completely, and only a small piece of me can possibly live in the other one. I’m handing everything over to him bit by bit, fully aware of his nasty habit of distortion and aggrandizement. Spinoza knew that all things desire to endure in their being: stones desire to be stones, and tigers tigers, for all eternity. I must remain in Borges rather than in myself (if in fact I am a self), and yet I recognize myself less in his books than in many others, or in the rich strumming of a guitar. Some years ago I tried to get away from him: I went from suburban mythologies to playing games with time and infinity. But these are Borges’ games now—I will have to think of something else. Thus my life is an escape. I will lose everything, and everything will belong to oblivion, or to the other.
I don’t know which of us wrote this.
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| Jason Reynolds |
In any other year, Jason Reynolds would be travelling up and down the US visiting schools and juvenile detention centres to speak to children, sometimes at three or four locations a day. Even when the local police are angry that he’s there, or when one of the parents has connections to the Ku Klux Klan, or the school librarian has received threats for inviting him. And without fail, from the moment Reynolds enters the room, kids fall over themselves to meet the guy in jeans who will speak to them about rap and sneakers as much as the importance of reading, of being kind.
