The “Gypsy Ballads”by

Federico García LorcaPart I and II of II

Lorca: The Spanish Civil War and Martyrdom

• On July 27, 1936, the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic saw its worst fear come to fruition when a failed coup d’état by a sector of the army gave rise to the nationalist-traditionalist rebellion known today as the Spanish Civil War. Less than a month later, Granada’s laureate became one of the Republic’s first martyrs when the fascist Falange kidnapped and murdered Federico García Lorca. Every day that the civil war raged on it became increasingly international in scope, as the Nationalist rebels enlisted the aid of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy while the Republicans turned to Mexico, the Soviet Union, and to the International Brigades for help on the front lines.

• The war also became a colonial war when Nationalist forces easily took hold of Spanish Morocco and, with it, the battle-hardened Army of Africa. Commanded by General Francisco Franco and composed of the Spanish Foreign Legion and (often times) conscripted Moroccans, the shock troops of the Army of Africa were airlifted to the Spanish Peninsula by the Luftwaffe and quickly took control of south-western Spain.

Folk Forms and the Left

1) One of the factors that engendered García Lorca’s warm reception in Spain and Latin American was the leftist argument that predated and surrounded the publication of Romancero gitano in avant-garde poetic circles around the world; namely, that folk forms (while not in-themselves radical) were often the best means to communicate radical ideas to the common people.

2) The leftist acclaim that surrounded Lorca’s international celebrity was largely due to the success of his seminal Romancero gitano (1928), a collection that, albeit possessed by unparalleled originality, represented an engagement (as did Hughes’s “blues” verse) with folk forms.

3) These romanceros are easily conceptualized as local eruptions of an aesthetic conviction, a faith in folk forms, held by leftists and recently embraced by the world’s avant-garde.

Un poeta en espardeñas” [“A Catalan Poet”]

The Capitulation of Granada, by F. Padilla Miguel Nicolás Langston Hernandez Guillén Hughes

The conversation went drifting toward the struggle in Spain and toward the possibility for a literature closer to our pain. In other words, the possibility of bringing a new spirit to Spanish letters, one that brought to them the life of the trenches, the martyrdom of the cities, and the crimes of the fascist invaders. --But it should not simply be—one of us pointed out—a literature of war, but also, and this is more important, a literature of revolution. Miguel intervened and said: I believe in that literature of ours, the product of the revolution and of the war. How’s it going to be produced? I don’t know. But only a total lack of artistic sensibility would make it possible for one to feel how death patrols the battle fronts, and then refuse to help our voice broadcast and fix that drama… Interrupting, Langston Hughes exclaimed: --It’s not only that. Rather, we know how mankind’s great movements always introduce a concomitant artistic movement, principally literary. The war in Spain has an enormous dramatic force, really, but the social transformation that is underway as a result of that war is still more profound. Moreover, it’s a transformation that has worked enough already to propel a people towards the conquest of their liberty. I believe that, for now, we cannot forsake traditional forms. They’re the ones the people know, and hence the best vehicle to broadcast a new unrest. On the other hand, two elements have to be weaved together, form and content. It’s always good to talk to the people in a voice that doesn’t alarm them.

--In the trenches there are a great number of men of the people whose literary vocation sprouted facing the enemy; and there’s no small part of that production that demonstrates first order talent. Haven’t you all read some of those things, principally the war ballads?

The Spanish Romancero1) The romanceros of old were poems written or

recited in octasyllabic verse with assonant rhymes ending each even numbered line. The romanceros date back to the tenth century and find close cousins—in regard not only to their employment of a popular rhyme scheme, a traditional meter, and a colloquial register, but also in their use of themes martial, heroic, and fantastic—in the English popular ballad and heroic, and fantastic—in the English popular ballad and the French ballade.

2) Prior to the Spanish Civil War, these romanceros could be divided into five main categories: the romances históricos, which narrate either primitive or non-primitive history; the romances fronterizos, which offer histories of the war for Granada; the romances carolingios, dedicated to chivalric epics and legends from France; the romances novelescos, inspired by common Western folklore; and both the romances eruditos, erudite retellings of popular romances, and the romances artísticos, original poems written by professional poets

ROMANCE DEL REY MORO QUE PERDIÓ VALENCIA

Helo, helo por do viene el moro por la calzada,caballero a la jineta encima una yegua baya,borceguíes marroquíes y espuela de oro calzada,una adarga ante los pechos y en su mano una azagaya.

Mirando estaba Valencia, como está tan bien cercada:-¡Oh, Valencia, oh Valencia, de mal fuego seas quemada!Primero fuiste de moros que de cristianos ganada.

Si la lanza no me miente, a moros serás tornada;aquel perro de aquel Cid prenderélo por la barba,su mujer, doña Jimena, será de mí cautivada,su hija, Urraca Hernando, será mi enamorada,

Fernando, King of Aragon, before Granada lies,With dukes and barons many a one, and champions of emprise;With all the captains of Castile that serve his lady's crownHe drives Boabdil from his gates, and plucks the crescent down. So far good. Now for the conclusion:The Moorish maidens, while she spoke, around her silence kept,But her master dragged the dame away-then loud and long they wept:

The Romancero and the Spanish Civil War• You [Lorca], on the stones of the old Spanish romancero, with Juan Ramón and

Machado, were another, unusual and strong, at the same time foundation and crown for the old Castilian tradition. Then the war came. Our country’s people and poets write romances. After ten months of fighting, almost a thousand have been collected. You—the glory going mostly to you—walk beneath almost all of them. Your voice, remembered, through other voices is heard in our war.

• (Rafael Alberti)

With the advent of the Spanish Civil War, the popularity of the romancero soared. In the words of Alberti, soldiers and professional poets alike turned to “el viejo metro tradicional” [“the old traditional meter”] to express “[l]a nueva conciencia política cantaba por España” [“the new political conscience being sung throughout Spain”. Moreover, Alberti—having received thousands of romanceros from the battle front at the Alianza— recalls dedicating a column in El mono azul to their publication, qualifying them as both “casi periodística” [“almost journalistic”] and as “el lenguaje más vital de aquella realidad” [“the most vital language of that reality”] In addition to their journalistic quality, the romanceros de la guerra served chiefly as propaganda and can furthermore be subdivided into six categories: romances narrativos, the closest cousin to the romancero of old that portrayed episodes from the war from a limited, or personal, perspective; romances encomiástics, which differed little from romances narrativos and elegized heroes and heroic deeds or attempted to bolster esprit de corps; romances exhortativos, utilitarian romances designed, often apoetically, to incite; romances satíricos o insultantes, generally an attack on an enemy (person or country); romances morales, which offered didactic, exemplary tales of Republican virtue or conduct; and romances líricos, generally small, intimate portraits of individuals (a soldier missing a limb, an orphan, etc.) imbued with the intense atmosphere of war .

Popular Front Poetics?Lorca’s poetic Credo

[T]o make art life, and life art, with no gulf between the artist and the people. After all, as Lorca said, “The poem, the song, the picture is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink—and in drinking, understand themselves.”

Lorca’s “Time and Space Continuum” Narration and the Notion of Aspect

“The Ballad of the Sleepwalker”The Shadow of Narration

Talking Points

1) Who is pronouncing the poem’s opening lines?

2) Who is being addressed?

3) What happens in the poem?

4) What are the consequences of engendering multiple lines of narration given the history of the Spanish romancero

“Preciosa and the Air”Multiple Cosmologies and

Multiple Intertexts

Talking PointsImposing three mythological figures, empires, and inter-texts:1) Ovid’s Boreas:BOREAS was the purple-winged god of the north wind, one of the four directional Anemoi (wind-gods). He was also the god of winter, who swept down from the cold northern mountains of Thrake, chilling the air with his icy breath. To the north, beyond his mountain home, lay Hyperborea, a land of eternal spring which was never touched by the god's cold wind. When Boreas sought a wife and—to his surprise—he could not win her with his words, he carried off Oreithyia ("mountain gale"), daughter of King Erekhtheus of Athens, who was playing with her companions in a flowery riverside meadow. Boreas and his brother winds were often imagined as horse-shaped gods. An old Greek folk belief was that the winds Boreas and Zephyros would sweep down upon the mares in early spring and fertilize them in the shape of wind-formed stallions. 2) St. Christopher:Christopher asked him how he could serve Christ. When the hermit suggested fasting and prayer, Christopher replied that he was unable to perform that service. The hermit then suggested that because of his size and strength Christopher could serve Christ by assisting people to cross a dangerous river, where they were perishing in the attempt. The hermit promised that this service would be pleasing to Christ. After Christopher had performed this service for some time, a little child asked him to take him across the river. During the crossing, the river became swollen and the child seemed as heavy as lead, so much that Christopher could scarcely carry him and found himself in great difficulty. When he finally reached the other side, he said to the child: "You have put me in the greatest danger. I do not think the whole world could have been as heavy on my shoulders as you were." The child replied: "You had on your shoulders not only the whole world but Him who made it. I am Christ your king, whom you are serving by this work.“3) Pan4) Cervantes’ The Gypsy Girl “When Preciosa beats her tambourine….” (Novelas Ejemplares: Disparities between Literary norms and experience)

An Andalusian Retable

• Although it is called Gypsy, the book as a whole is the poem of Andalusia, and I call it Gypsy because the Gypsy is the most distinguished, profound, and aristocratic element of my country, the one most representative of its way of being and which best preserves the fire, blood, and alphabet of Andalusian and universal truth.

• The book, therefore, is a retable expressing Andalusia, with Gypsies, horses, archangels, planets, its Jewish breeze, its Roman breeze, rivers, crimes, the everyday touch of the smuggler and the celestial touch of the naked children of Cordova who tease Saint Raphael. A book in which the visible Andalusia is hardly mentioned but in which palpitates the invisible one. And now I am going to be explicit. It is an anti-picturesque, anti-folkloric book, with not a single short jacket, bullfighter’s suit of lights, wide-brimmed sombrero or tambourine [….]

“San Rafael (Córdoba)”Revolving Poetics of Poetics of Revolution?

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