Frederico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936)

(Translated by Stephen Spender and J.L Gill)

For those outside Spain, who read no Spanish, Lorca is probably the most famous Spanish poet of the twentieth century.

This is a very different poem to the ones I’ve previously read on the podcast.

It helps, listening to this poem or reading it, to remember Lorca was friends with Dali and Bunuel. There is a story that when those two were making Un Chien Andalou, their ground breaking ‘surrealist’ film, one would sketch scenes and the other would say, no, that means something, throw it out.

‘Avant Garde’ and ‘Surrealist’ are terms that might be useful as pathways to approach this poem without necessarily being definitive or even accurate as labels.

For a long time I used this poem as an example of what happens when readers are confronted with work they find initially incomprehensible. Read it, I’d say, then come back and tell me what you think it means. The answers were often ingenious. They varied greatly. They were all interesting.

So what does it mean they’d ask.

It means what it says. Images that link without narrative, suggesting narrative, cohering because they linked in the writer’s mind at the time of writing. The links are not made explicit. But the images sing together.

Yes, but what does it mean?

Wrong question.

This is taken from ‘The Selected poems of Federico Garcia Lorca’ edited by Francisco Garcia Lorca and Donald m. Allen. A New Directions paperback 1985.