A Volcano in Constant Eruption
HERRICK, WILLIAM
A Volcano in Constant Eruption' Selected Letters of Federico Garcia Lorca Edited and translated by David Gershator New Directions. 172pp. $15.00. Reviewed by William Herrick Author, "Kill...
...In the last act she will be dressed in white and all the decor will be in the same tone...
...It's not that I don't want to work (since I am already suffering and that's work), but it's a big bother, and to you—my savior—I turn...
...It started with a very delicate trembling similar to a tempo rubato of Chopin, which I converted into a strong and serious rhythm with the intention of scaring the family and making them run upstairs and downstairs in great confusion...
...This case was intense and left me yellow, with ears like paper...
...From his pen came songs, ballads, poems and plays...
...Entwined in every line and phrase of these letters is not only his personal character, but also his single-minded obsession to become a major poet and playwright...
...A woman half seen and half loved at the age of nine, when I went from Fuente Vaquer-os to Granada in an old stagecoach, whose driver played a wild tune on his copper trumpet...
...They couldn't find me...
...So they go, these letters...
...Here is one to Salvador Dali's young sister: "My dear friend Ana Maria: "I haven't answered you before because for a number of days I've staged a magnificent attack of fever, and I had to give it the care it deserved...
...Two voices resound: the clock and the wind...
...The reader is made privy to the secrets, the depressions, thesuccesses, the confessions that only come to light in such writing...
...When she decides to die, she's already dead, and death doesn't frighten her in the least...
...They could no longer find me...
...And at what moment...
...They ransacked the cafes and the cemeteries and the churches, they opened the winecasks and the closets, they destroyed three skeletons to yank out their gold teeth...
...Reviewed by William Herrick Author, "Kill Memory," "Love and Terror," "Shadows and Wolves" The first of these intelligently and beautifully translated Selected Letters is dated February 1918, when Federico Garcia Lorca was still a youth of 20...
...Six years before his death, in Poet in New York, his most tumultuous and impassioned work, he wrote, with an almost eerie prevision: When the pure forms caved in beneath the cri cri of the daisies I realized they had murdered me...
...As a gregarious man who thrived on attention, Lorca would, I think, have been very happy with the Selected Letters, and especially with the skill David Gershator has exhibited in putting together this collection...
...The second half of his life, apal-try 19 years, was as brilliantly productive as that of almost any writer who ever lived...
...His transcendent imagination leaps out at you with what Pablo Neruda, after meeting him, called "an energy in constant rapidity, a happiness, a brilliance, a tenderness entirely superhuman...
...Who can say that he saw you...
...Must I, Antonito of my heart and soul, abandon my children [two poems he was working on at the time] without raising them, tears of my spirit and flesh of my heart, to caress cold tomes of dead histories and moribund concepts...
...The bones of the man who had already become one of Spain's greatest, most popular poets and dramatists were then consigned to an unmarked grave...
...Lorca's natural nobility and gentleness are expressed with felicity of word...
...If you know Lorca's oeuvre, and admire it as much as I do, you will want to see his development, vividly revealed here...
...Federico Garcia Lorca was killed at age 38...
...In almost every instance he asked for something—criticism of his work, advice, even what courses to take if he returns to college to please his generous father, a rich Granadan landowner...
...Thus to Antonio Gallego Burin, a writer, editor and critic in Madrid: "And here is my question: What shall I do...
...Still I regret it wasn't an attack of toothache, which is the most sumptuous, best organized and most alarming attack, yet without after effects...
...One must make him a part of oneself and smile...
...But it was known that the sixth moon fled upstream, and that the sea remembered—suddenly!— the names of all the drowned...
...As Lorca himself wrote, in a letter to the essayist and journalist Melchor Fernandez Almagro about a mutual friend who had just died, "It seems that we should commune through Ciria and forget his appearance...
...They couldn 't find me...
...Writing to Almagro, a lifelong friend to whom many of these letters are addressed, Lorca recalls how one of his plays was born: Marinata went out for a walk and a soldier stepped out to meet her...
...What subjects will I be able to pass...
...The letters are so marvelously alive that I can barely resist quoting from all of them...
...While dawn floats off without you...
...And that is true in the case of Lorca...
...that was not his style...
...Where am I sure to pass and with whom...
...It worked out very well...
...If you don't know Lorca's work and want to embark upon an adventure into "a volcano in constant eruption," as someone described him, the letters are a splendid starting point...
...Do you think it's all right if I take History, Paleography (which ought to be easy) and Numismatics...
...We have more than biographical interest in a writer's correspondence, for it often records his growth as an artist...
...Lorca communicated with friends, poets, painters, and his composer neighbor Manuel de Falla...
...Dressed in white, with her hair loose and a melodramatic expression verging on the sublime, this woman strolled through the secret little road of my childhood with an unmistakable air...
...What sorrow of illuminated shadow...
...Lorca held nothing back...
...It's gone now...
...I must stop quoting, since there are over 100 of them, all lively and spontaneous...
...Neither the ballad nor history prevent me at all from imagining her thus...
...If I'm afraid of doing this play, it's precisely because I'm disturbing my very delicate memories of that martyred blonde widow...
...The last is dated July 1936, one month before he was murdered by ultra-Rightists at Viznar, in the mountains above Granada, his native and much-loved city in Andalucia...
Vol. 67 • March 1984 • No. 5
