Radio: Death Of A Poet

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31061, 17 May 1966, Page 13

Radio: Death Of A Poet

Spain, wrote Federico Garcia Lorca, is “a nation of death, a nation open to death. ... A dead person in Spain is more alive when dead than is the case anywhere else.” So Lorca’s best plays were tragedies, his poems dripped blood, and his own futile death at the bands of a Fascist firing squad was tragic confirmation of bis vision.

To many people today Lorca is the voice of modern Spain. Many of bis admirers would find it difficult to name another Spanish poet; to them his death was as much the fulfilment of his career as the tragedy of it, for Lorca’s life has been called a long flirtation with all the artistic expressions of death. Lorca was obsessed with the duende, the dark spirit of Spanish song, “the spirit of the earth,” and his poems were steeped In it. Every step, he wrote, “that a man . . . takes towards the tower of his perfection is at the cost of the struggle he maintains with a duende, not with an angel . . . and not with a muse.”

Lorca was born in Fuentevaqueros in 1899. His parents enrolled him at Granada University, but be never finished his degree; be was happier in the cafes, getting to know the gypsies who were his major inspiration.

He learned to play the piano and the guitar, met Manuel de Falla who encouraged him to collect traditional folk-songs and set them to music, and in 1918 published his first prose work. He published his first play in 1921, his first volume of poems, “Libro de Poemas,” in 1921. In 1929 Lorca ventured outside Spain for the first time, to New York; but for him America was an alien world, a world of “extra-human architecture and furious rhythm, geometry and anguish.” By 1930 he was back in Spain and entering the most fruitful period of his career. In 1931 he submitted to the new Republican Government a plan for a travelling theatre with students as actors. The result, in 1932, was the formation of La Barraca, a travelling company which performed Spanish classics under Lorca’s direction in Spanish towns and remote villages. At the same time Lorca was writing furiously. “Blood Wedding,” the first play in his great tragic trilogy, l was performed in Madrid in 1933 and was an immediate success. A year later he introduced the second tragedy, “Yerma,” and in 1935, overwhelmed by the death of his

friend Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, tore from his anguish his finest poem, the “Lament for a Bullfighter.” On the lonely morning in July, 1936, when the firing squad came for him he had finished the third part of the trilogy, “The House of Bernada Alba,” and was working on a book of sonnets. He was taken to Viznar on the hills outside Granada and shot. His body was never found. A few years earlier, in one of his poems, he had predicted this:

“I realised I had been murdered. They searched cafes and cemeteries, they opened barrels and cupboards, they plundered three skeletons to remove their gold teeth. They did not find me. They never found me? No. They never found me.” Lorca’s life and death are the subject of “The Death of Federico,” this Friday night’s play from 3YC. The author, Anton Quintana, is a Dutchborn radio dramatist who writes under his Spanish mother’s maiden name; this is his tenth radio play. “The Death of Federico” is a montage of images from Lorca’s life. Periods crisscross in seemingly unconnected flashes, culminating in the final, empty morning. The play has been produced for the N.Z.B.C. by Bernard Kearns.