A P O C R Y P H A L L O R C A
T R A N S L A T I O N , P A R O D Y , K I T S C H
J O N A T H A N M A Y H E W
JONATHAN MAYHEW is professor of Spanish at the University of Kansas. He is the author of three books, most recently of The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry, 1980–2000 (2009).
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2009 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51203-7 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-51203-7 (cloth)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mayhew, Jonathan, 1960–
Apocryphal Lorca : translation, parody, kitsch / Jonathan Mayhew.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51203-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-51203-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. García Lorca, Federico, 1898–1936—Influence. 3. García Lorca, Federico, 1898–1936—Translations into English. 4. García Lorca, Federico, 1898–1936—Parodies, imitations, etc. 5. García Lorca, Federico, 1898–1936—Adaptations. 6. García Lorca, Federico, 1898–1936—Appreciation— United States. 7. American poetry—Spanish influences. I. Title.
PS159.S7M39 2009 868'.6209—dc22
2008036494
When the translation and the original meet
The doubtful original and the strong mistranslation The original feels like a triple pun
CONTENTS
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii
1 Federico García Lorca (Himself ) 1
2 The American Agenda 22
3 Poet-Translators: Langston Hughes to Paul Blackburn 53
4 The Deep Image 78
5 Apocryphal Lorca: Robert Creeley and Jack Spicer 102 6 Frank O’Hara’s “Lorcaescas” 122
7 Kenneth Koch: Parody and Pedagogy 143
8 Jerome Rothenberg: The Lorca Variations 160
Conclusion: An American Lorca? 175
Notes 183
Bibliography 205
PREFACE
This is not a book about the Spanish playwright and poet Federico García Lorca (1898–1936). I do not wish to add an additional mono-graph to the vast and erratic bibliomono-graphy on his life and work. It is, rather, an exploration of the apocryphal afterlife of García Lorca in the poetic culture of the United States. Twentieth-century American poets, in large numbers, have translated his poems and written imitations, parodies, and pastiches—along with essays and reviews. With the pos-sible exception of Rainer Maria Rilke, Lorca is the twentieth-century European poet with the strongest presence in the English language.1
While not all of these poets have been equally devoted to Lorca, the sheer length and variety of this list indicate several possible avenues of approach to the study of Lorca and English-language poetry. We could use a monograph with the title Lorca and African AmericanPoetry, ad-dressing his impact on poets like Hughes, Kaufman, Baraka, Mackey, and another on his importance for gay male poets (Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg, O’Hara . . .). A critical look at the history of the translation of Lorca into English would be a worthy project, as would a study of Lorca’s influence on the poetics of the deep image. The book I have written does, in fact, address these issues, some in more depth than others. Nevertheless, I have not been able to address every single in-stance of English-language Lorquismo. I have been guided by my own tastes and interests and by a desire to develop a thesis.
My overarching idea is that Lorca in English translation and adapta-tion has become a specifically American poet, adaptable to the cultural and ideological desiderata of U.S. poets during the cold war period. 3
I will argue, further, that the American Lorca is largely an apocryphal figure, an invention of poets in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. Lorca is unique in the extent to which he, or at least some im-age of him, has been fully assimilated into the American idiom. Other foreign-language poets have been influential in the United States, but none has been so thoroughly Americanized.
of a genuine original. The object of my study has been elusive: I have looked for Lorca in the usual places and not found him there, yet I have sometimes found more substantial evidence of his presence in unexpected places. I have been especially interested in delineating the “negative space” of Lorca’s influence, as in a drawing that suggests the shape of two objects by depicting the empty space between them. What Lorca is not, in the American context, is just as significant as the positive values he represents.
The genre I have termed “apocryphal translation” is key to my ex-ploration of this negative space. Robert Creeley’s “After Lorca” and several poems from Jack Spicer’s book of the same title are translations of texts that do not exist in the original Spanish. As with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets From the Portuguese, there are no original texts standing behind these translations. Unlike Browning’s poems, however, these texts sometimes create the strong illusion of an original text, or in other cases an uncertainty as to whether any original ex-ists. Expanding the definition of “apocryphal translation” to include other varieties of Lorquiana in U.S. poetry, I have considered further examples: Frank O’Hara’s “Lorcaescas,” a nonextant work mentioned in another O’Hara poem; Kenneth Koch’s hoax (or parody) “Some South American Poets,” based, in my surmise, on an amalgam of Lorca and José Luis Borges; and Jerome Rothenberg’s The Lorca Variations, a book-length set of variations based on Rothenberg’s previous transla-tion of Lorca’s Suites.
of this type will become available. When the original text does not ex-ist at all, then, we get a pure vision of how one culture might imagine another.
Since my focus is on the translation of works that Lorca did not write, my examination of his literary career will be necessarily brief. In chapter 1, “Federico García Lorca (Himself),” I will sketch the portrait of a charismatic, protean, and enigmatic authorial figure. The pur-pose of this chapter is to establish an implicit point of comparison with the Americanized Lorca that dominates the rest of the book. My Lorca has a greater intellectual capacity and a more highly developed literary culture than the mythic stereotype allows for. Distorted views of Lorca go wrong, usually, by virtue of being incomplete, of failing to account for the multifaceted nature of his achievement.
No study of Lorca’s poetry on its own terms can explain why his poetry resonated so strongly in the United States. For an explanation of this resonance, I turn in a second chapter to a set of purely domestic
criteria that have little to do with Lorca as he might appear within his own cultural context. Lorca was particularly attractive to poets seeking to define a new variety of American cultural nationalism. He arrived on the scene as an alien figure, strongly identified with a quite differ-ent brand of national exceptionalism—that of Spain itself. Far from being an obstacle, however, Lorca’s foreignness proved useful to those in search of a form of American cultural nationalism that might stand opposed to cold war politics. Lorca’s poetry came to the fore with the poets associated with The New American Poetry, an anthology pub-lished in 1960. The contributions of African American and gay male poets are especially noteworthy during this period, but there is also a more generic Lorquismo, characterized by a tone of naive enthusiasm and by a proliferation of abusive citations of the duende.
Poet-translators have played a key role in the creation of the Ameri-can Lorca. In chapter 3, I will examine the strategies of domestication
been impractical. Chapter 4 will address the phenomenon of “deep image” poetry, a movement in midcentury U.S. poetics that reportedly owes a portion of its initial impetus to Lorca. I will conclude that the debt of deep image poetry to Lorca is less substantial than many critics have assumed. The founders of this movement drew inspiration from many sources aside from the “Spanish surrealism,” while Lorca himself has a minor role in the later development of this style.
In chapters 5 through 8, I will examine the Lorquian writings of Creeley, Spicer, O’Hara, Koch, and Rothenberg. The choice of these particular poets, and not others, requires some explanation. Spicer’s
After Lorca and Rothenberg’s The Lorca Variations are obvious choices, since they are book-length homages to the Spanish poet by major fig-ures. Creeley’s short poem “After Lorca” is too perfect an example of apocryphal translation to omit. The chapters on O’Hara and Koch, on the other hand, show the connection between Lorca and American poets who are not usually associated with Spanish poetry: by looking at the Spanish side of poets usually associated more with French poetry, I attempt to take measure of the extent of his penetration into American poetry.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities al-lowed me a year’s leave in which to complete the manuscript. Kathy Porsch of the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kan-sas offered expert assistance in preparing the fellowship application. I would also like to acknowledge the Fundación Federico García Lorca in Madrid, where I did research in the Summer of 2006, and its cour-teous and helpful librarians.
Many others helped to make this book possible. My parents, Leon and Janet Mayhew, had books by Lorca in the house where I grew up. My first professors of Lorca were José Luis Cano and Reed Anderson. The incomparable comparatist Howard Young offered his expert ad-vice on an embryonic version of this project written many years ago.
I would also like to single out Vicky Unruh, my supportive de-partment chair, along with my past and present colleagues in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas; the participants in the Poetics Seminar at the Hall Center for the Humanities, especially Jill Kuhnheim, Cyrus Console, Ken Irby, Joe Harrington, and Judith Roitman; Akiko Tsuchiya and Julia Tsuchiya-Mayhew; and the readers of my blog Bemsha Swing, too numerous to name individually.
Ben Friedlander, Roberta Johnson, Herb Levy, Juan Carlos Mestre, David Shapiro, Mark Statman, and four readers for the University of Chicago Press (Andrew A. Anderson, Mary Ann Caws, Stephen Fred-man, and Christopher Maurer). Others who inspired my work include Marjorie Perloff, Luis Fernández Cifuentes, John Wilcox, and the late John Kronik. All errors of fact and judgment, of course, are my own responsibility.
1 FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA (HIMSELF)
En mis conferencias he hablado a veces de la Poesía, pero de lo único que no puedo hablar es de mi poesía. Y no porque sea un inconsciente de lo que hago. Al contrario, si es verdad que soy poeta por la gracia de Dios—o del demonio—, también lo es que lo soy por la gracia de la técnica y del esfuerzo, y de darme cuenta en absoluto de lo que es un poema.1
[In my lectures I have spoken at times about Poetry, but the only thing I cannot talk about is my poetry. And not because I am unconscious of what I am do-ing. On the contrary, if it is true that I am a poet by the grace of God—or the devil—it is also true that I am a poet by the grace of technique and effort, and by having an absolute awareness of what a poem is.]
Who, or what, is Lorca? The idea that certain distortions and oversim-plifications run through his American reception only makes sense in contrast to some presumably more accurate and complete view. Yet there is no way of restoring the author’s work to what it was before being subjected to the distorting lens of interpretation. My own biases will come into play in the contention that Lorca is an intellectual, self-aware artist: I resist the uncritical, hagiographical treatment to which he has often been subjected, and am skeptical of approaches that rely too heavily on the romantic ideas of the “genius” or the Lorquian ver-sion of that idea: the duende.
what Lorca really is. In fact, my view of the Spanish poet is grounded in a profound sense of bewilderment rather than on any dogmatic cer-tainty. I have been struggling with Lorca’s work, on and off, for almost thirty years, without arriving at many firm conclusions. My bedrock sense of Lorca is as a poet whose poetic thought is embodied directly in the poems themselves. His material is the concrete reality of words, im-ages, and rhythms, and he has relatively clearheaded ideas about what he was doing with this material, possessing a pragmatic intelligence rather than an abstract or theoretical mind. Aesthetics, as I define it, is the perceptual in its relation to human “structures of feeling.” Lorca is a “professor of the five bodily senses,” to use his own apt formula-tion, endowed with an acute eye and ear and an unequalled emotional responsiveness.2 The rest of this chapter will be devoted to describing what Lorca is not; I could develop my own positive view at greater length, of course, but many aspects of Lorca’s work do not come into play at all in the American response and are thus largely irrelevant to my project.
Incomplete or misleading views of Lorca have their roots in roman-tic ideas of poeroman-tic genius, and in stereotypes of Andalusian culture left over from European constructions of romantic Spain, often filtered through the popular writings of Ernest Hemingway. The duende is a powerful concept because it embodies simultaneously the romantic sublime and the Andalusian image-repertoire. The view of Lorca held by many American readers, in fact, is based primarily on the essay “Play and Theory of the Duende” along with some loose and usually unexam-ined ideas about flamenco, bullfighting, and “Spanish surrealism.” The caricature of an Andalusian Lorca, a poet both defined and limited by a regional identity, has a long history both in Spain and in the United States. Even some Hispanists continue to perpetuate this caricature, whether by commission or omission.
Andalu-sian gracia, or else as a poet of the romantic sublime. These are Lorcas of straw that are quite easy to knock down. Or so one might think. What is harder is to do without such ideas. The critical construction of a non-Andalusian Lorca would be a serious distortion, since it would ignore the way in which the poet drew upon a particular image rep-ertoire, even while consciously distancing himself from its more ste-reotypical expressions. It should be pointed out, moreover, that the Andalusian cultural tradition to which Lorca is heir is complex and multifaceted in its own right, including not only the romantic ste-reotype of the gypsy, but also baroque influences (Góngora, Soto de Rojas), the Moorish and Jewish heritage of the pre-1492 period, and a certain elegant urbanity characteristic of the late nineteenth-century period. Lorca’s literary Andalusia is itself a hybrid construction, not a one-dimensional caricature.3
Would it even be desirable to construct a Lorca free from roman-tic ideology, a Lorca without duende? At one point in the develop-ment of this project I explained it to myself, and to anyone else who would listen, as an escape from the duende, in direct opposition to the seemingly insatiable American appetite for the romantic image. But it turned out to be even harder to escape from the duende than to find it. For better or for worse, this concept holds sway over the American reception of Lorca, although the duende itself is not nearly as prevalent during the earlier stages of this reception. Even my own initial interest in Lorca began with a similar enthusiasm for Spanish culture.
signify. Apocryphal Lorcas proliferate because, like Yeats, he was a man of many masks, a protean figure rather than an easily classifiable one. The poet’s brother Francisco García Lorca describes his artistic devel-opment, in both poetry and drama, as “a continuous metamorphosis” from one work to the next, rather than a process of logical develop-ment or maturation.6 Harold Bloom, although fully in thrall to the ideology of genius, also recognizes Lorca’s plurality: “Lorca is many poets at once: the singer of the Gypsy Ballads, the tragic dramatist of Yerma and Blood Wedding, the hyperbolical surrealist of Poet in New York, the quasi-Moorish elegist of The Tamarit Divan.”7 Nevertheless, Bloom goes on to interpret Lorca’s work, in typically North American fashion, through the archetype of the duende: a recognition of Lorca’s inchoate multiplicity does not necessarily lead to a suspicion of this unifying idea. 8
Lorca studies, beginning with his 1972 book investigating the poet’s murder in Granada, has been inestimable. Yet the gulf between his un-derstanding of the circumstances of Lorca’s life and his literary naiveté is disturbing. Following Fernández Cifuentes, I would contend that Lorca is precisely the type of author who most requires a sophisticated critical approach informed by the precepts of modern literary theory. Unfortunately, Lorca is the modern Spanish poet most likely to be subjected to naive readings that fail to distinguish between the bio-graphical subject, the implied author, and the poetic speaker, or that view his symbols as a kind of secret code to be deciphered.
of place. I believe, however, that it is naive to assume that the varie-gated explorations of sexuality in Lorca’s work can be traced back to a unitary biographical cause. Are all his dramatic characters and poetic speakers merely projections of the Lorca himself? Are the secrets be-hind his work more significant than the work itself ?
If Lorca’s life does not explain his work, his death has even less ex-planatory power. The circumstances of his murder during the initial stage of the Spanish civil war have had a disproportionate effect on his poetic afterlife. The Franco regime was all too happy to accept Jean-Louis Schonberg’s hypothesis that the ultimate motive for his killing was homosexual jealousy: that narrative, along with the idea of Lorca as a naive and politically unengaged writer, deflected the blame from the military uprising and the Spanish Falange. Schonberg, not coinci-dentally, insisted on seeing homosexuality as an interpretative key to all of Lorca’s work. Ian Gibson’s 1972 book The Death of Lorca, in a crucial act of historical revision, correctly reassigned the blame for Lorca’s killing on the political repression in Granada. There is an ongo-ing battle over the exhumation of Lorca’s body from its original restongo-ing place—a step that Gibson is advocating against the resistance of the Lorca family.14 This heightened attention to Lorca’s historical legacy in the wake of the one hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1998 and the ongoing debate over the “Ley de Memoria Histórica” [Law of Histori-cal Memory], passed by the Spanish Cortes in 2007, is legitimate. My own book, in fact, forms part of the larger effort on the part of many scholars to come to terms with Lorca’s ongoing literary, cultural, and historical legacy. My particular interest, however, is not in the value of his body as a political symbol in the debate over Spanish historical memory, but in the ongoing capacity of his poetry to generate new critical readings and textual transformations.
The “American Lorca” who is the subject of this book is not a corpus of texts, but an authorial construction with pronounced ideological effects. As Foucault argues in his classic essay “What is an Author?,” the “author-function” sets a given corpus apart and assigns it to a par-ticular discursive universe:
The author’s name serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse: the fact that the discourse has an author’s name, that one can say “this was written by so-and-so” or “so-and-so is its author,” shows that this discourse is not everyday ordinary speech that merely comes and goes, not something that is immediately consumable. On the con-trary, it is a speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status.15
Foucault goes on to argue that the “plurality of self” (which I have been attributing specifically to Lorca) is a characteristic of “all discourses en-dowed with the author-function.”16 In other words, the attribution of every poem, play, lecture, manuscript correction, and personal letter written by the same individual to a single function has the effect of lumping together widely divergent enunciatory positions.
In Lorca’s case this plurality is especially noteworthy, given the sty-listic and generic multiplicity of his work: some examples might be the authorial figure (“el poeta”) who addresses the audience in the prologue to a puppet play, the “I” of a short lyric poem like “Casida del llanto,” and the biographical subject who writes letters to his family from New York. We also attribute the words spoken by dramatic characters in Bodas de sangre, Así que pasen cinco años, and El público to the same author-function, though not directly to “Lorca” as a speaking subject. To make Lorca a singular rather than a plural subject, to sum him up in a single noun or adjective (Lorca, duende, lorquian, lorcaesque), is to commit an astounding ideological reduction.17
variegated poetic speakers and wearing a mask even, or especially, at his most intimate moments. A stylized, nonindividuated voice, reminis-cent of anonymous lyrics of the medieval period, often appears in the Canciones and Suites. The elegiac voice of “Llanto por Igacio Sánchez Mejías” speaks in the first person, but also in a highly stylized voice. In many very direct lyric poems from these books, there are no mark-ers of the first pmark-erson at all. “Canción del jinete” [“Rider’s Song”] and “La casada infiel” [“The Unfaithful Wife”] are dramatic monologues featuring identifiable first person speakers clearly differentiated from the perspective of the implied author.18 Another modality is the third person narrator of many poems of the Romancerogitano, who occa-sionally jumps through the fictional frame to interpellate his characters directly: Antoñito el Camborio, in his agony, addresses this narrator directly as “Federico García” and asks him to call the Guardia Civil.19 In the places where Lorca’s own autobiographical self would appear to be most in evidence, finally, the language often becomes densely metaphorical, as if to compensate for this seeming directness. The hy-perbolic autobiographical speaker of many of the poem in Poeta en Nueva York is a case in point.
The larger point here is that a poem by Lorca is a work of fiction, not a biographical document. The flesh-and-blood Lorca never had a son named “Juan,” as the speaker of the “Iglesia Abandonada” did. He never rode to Córdoba on a pony like the speaker of “Canción de jinete”; in fact, he could not ride a horse at all. The multiplicity of enunciatory positions means that there is no typical speaker of a Lorca poem who can be identified unproblematically with the biographical author. Bio-graphically minded criticism does not always require a first person lyric speaker identifiable with the author, but the absence of a clearly defined self at the center of Lorca’s poetry is, at the very least, a serious complication.
of the child genius would be a contradiction in terms. The underes-timation of Lorca’s intellectual capability and knowledge of literary history remains an obstacle to a fuller understanding of his work. In Spanish-speaking contexts, the idea of Lorca as a childlike innocent has had a long history, as Julián Jiménez Heffernan points out: “Lorca y Vallejo han sido durante demasiado tiempo nuestros poetas tontos, aplastados por dos losas absurdas, el infantalismo y el indigenismo.”21 [Lorca and Vallejo have for too long been our dumb poets, flattened out by two absurd tombstones, infantilism and indigenism.] Unfortu-nately, however, infantilism is only one of the burdens Lorca has had to bear. At various points in his reception in Spain and internation-ally, Lorca has been cast in the roles of the childlike innocent, the naive neopopularist, the primitive poet of myth, the gypsy singer of the cante jondo and the duende, and the surrealist channeler of un-conscious urges. He has been the object of condescension among his more scholarly inclined contemporaries, and the posthumous sponsor of anti-intellectual poetics in both the U.S. and in Spain.
imagery and with Lorquismo generally. Writing with great popular suc-cess for the stage (after some initial flops), he also wrote avant-garde plays that could not be performed in the theater of his own day.
From a global reading of his poetry, plays, correspondence, and lec-tures we can surmise that Lorca was, in the first place, an astute reader of Jorge Manrique, Garcilaso de la Vega, Cervantes, Saint John of the Cross, Luis de Góngora, Pedro Soto de Rojas, Lope de Vega, Santa Teresa de Ávila, Calderón de la Barca, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rubén Darío, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, as well as a serious student of traditional poetry in the anonymous tradition. In the theater, he was conversant with the work of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hugo, Ibsen, Galdós, Benavente, Valle-Inclán, Pirandello) and the classic Spanish comedia of the early modern period, along with Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians. This is not an exhaustive list: according to his brother Francisco, Federico was a voracious reader who possessed a high degree of general culture, despite being a rather poor student.22 By the poet’s own account, he listened to around a thousand lectures at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Ma-drid, where he lived during most of his twenties.23 Despite his iden-tification with primordial Spain, Lorca was, in fact, a cosmopolitan intellectual who came of age during the epoch of the historical avant- garde in Europe.24
elements from two or more periods of literary history in order to create new hybrids. In Romancero gitano [Gypsy ballads], for example, Lorca superimposes complex metaphors, reminiscent of seventeenth-century baroque poetry but also of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, on the tradition of the anonymous romances [ballads] first transcribed and collected in the fifteenth century. Lorca uses this hybrid genre in the creation of a mythic Andalusia represented by his Gypsy prota-gonists. This work, then, is not a simple neopopularist pastiche of the traditional Spanish ballad or romance. Since this book brought Lorca his initial fame, it is sometimes regarded as a concession to popular taste, yet it also contains some of Lorca’s most metaphorically dense and difficult poems.
The sheer quantity of Lorca’s writing, along with its scope and va-riety, is evidence of a strong work ethic and an extraordinary intellec-tual restlessness. Since he did not live past the age of thirty-eight, his entire literary production took shape in a relatively short span of time. In 1920, at the age of twenty-two, he completed his first published col-lection of poetry, Libro de poemas [Book of poems] and staged his first (unsuccessful) dramatic production with El maleficio de la mariposa [The butterfly’s curse]. By critical consensus both works are still rather im-mature in their conception, so we can place Lorca’s entire mature work within the sixteen-year period between 1921 and 1936. His achievement in lyric poetry during this period would be impressive in itself, even if he were not also one of the major European dramatists of the century. He wrote over a dozen major works of poetry and drama between Poema del cante jondo [Poem of the deep song] (written in November 1921 but not published until 1931) and his final play, La casa de Bernarda Alba [The house of Bernarda Alba].
makes this key observation in his essay “The Storyteller”: “‘A man who dies at the age of thirty-five,’ said Moritz Heimann once, ‘is at every point in his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.’ Nothing is more dubious than this sentence—but for the sole reason that the tense is wrong. A man—so says the truth that was meant here—who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who died at thirty-five.”25 So it is with Lorca, who died at the age of thirty-eight: our perspective on his career is conditioned by our knowledge of the terminal point in his life and career.
Before producing his mature work Lorca put himself through a lit-erary apprenticeship, beginning at a very young age and extending into his early twenties, during which he imitated and mastered the poetic and theatrical styles available to him. We learn from the redoubtable historian and biographer Ian Gibson that “Lorca inherited all the vigour of a speech that springs from the earth and expresses itself with extraor-dinary spontaneity.”26 What makes a statement like this worth ques-tioning is that it is typical of a widespread attitude toward the Spanish poet. We might note, in the first place, the romantic ideology implicit in the image of a language that “springs from the earth”—a conception wholly at odds with the lessons of modern linguistics. The idea that the mature style of Bodas de sangre [Blood wedding] was merely the poet’s natural inheritance also begs the question of why there is only one Lorca: if the stylized dialogue of his plays were simply the result of tape recording the vigorous speech of Andalusian peasants, then the native soil from which Lorca sprang would have produced many other spontaneous geniuses of the same type.
col-lected in a critical edition by Andrés Soria Olmedo, reveals a similarly arduous process of literary apprenticeship.27 The fact that Lorca’s very early writings read like juvenilia rather than works of genius is fully to be expected: these writings reveal a diligent young writer systematically teaching himself to write by imitating the prevalent stylistic models of the day, not a feverish poet inspired by daimonic powers. A look at Lorca’s typical creative process reveals two methods that are different from each other but not necessarily antithetical: he nurtured and de-veloped some poetic projects over relatively long stretches of time, tak-ing them apart and putttak-ing them back together again. Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York] and Suites are good examples of this process.28 In other cases, he mulled over a project for a relatively long period of time, allowing it to develop in his mind, and then wrote a more or less definitive version in a few days “as though in a fever of creation.”29 While clearly different from each other, neither pattern reveals a purely spontaneous, unreflective approach to literary creation.
The preceding description of Lorca’s writing career ought to put to rest the strawman view of Lorca as a kind of idiot savant of literature, a creator of pure genius whose level of literary culture was rudimentary.30 It is hard to imagine, in fact, why Lorca’s level of literary erudition was ever doubted. Perhaps an emphasis on book learning is at odds with the ideology of genius: Lorca did not pursue an academic career and appeared to be relatively unlearnèd when compared to the eminent “poet-professors” of his own epoch, like Dámaso Alonso, Jorge Guillén, and Pedro Salinas. At one point Guillén himself encouraged the younger Lorca to pursue such a career—an idea that horrified Lorca’s friend Salvador Dalí.31 As Dalí realized, Lorca did not have an academic or scholarly temperament, despite his assimilation of thousands of pages of literature. His erudition was more of the performative and prag-matic type. Although he toyed briefly with the idea of being a pro-fessor like Guillén, he ultimately preferred giving lectures to writing essays, directing golden age plays to editing critical editions of them.
analytically based modes of scholarship. Although Lorca never posi-tioned himself as an systematic theorist of poetry, his lectures do in fact reveal an astute critical mind and a considerable level of erudition. The well-known lecture on the duende is a case in point: this short prose-piece written for oral performance is allusive to the point of being nearly incomprehensible to the average undergraduate Spanish major in an American university circa 2008. Lorca’s multifaceted definition of the duende is not easy to grasp even when the references are explained. This lecture is not, in any case, a straightforward description of Lorca’s own creative process that can be taken at face value, but a complexly metaphorical description of a concept that continually changes shape before the eyes of the reader. Is the duende a principle that applies mostly to bullfighting and cante jondo, a mostly performative principle? Or is it principle of artistic creation most comparable to the inspiring muse or the angel? Is it specific to Spanish culture or is it a principle that could be applied to Nietzsche, Goethe, Socrates, and other names that Lorca cites? Through his allusive and metaphorically dense pre-sentation, Lorca introduces layer upon layer of complication rather than taking us closer to a clear delineation of the concept.
The underestimation of the complexity of Lorca’s work takes an-other, more subtle form in commentators who contrast the facile neo-popularist author of works like Poema del cante jondo, Romancero gitano, and Bodas de sangre, to the avant-garde experimenter of Poeta en Nueva York and El público [The audience]. The first to take a disparaging view of Lorca’s neopopularist works were Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, who felt that their friend was not sufficiently avant-garde. The “Anda-lusian dog” of their film collaboration Le chien Andalou is Lorca him-self, seen as a hapless neurotic.32 The young novísimo poet Guillermo Carnero, writing in 1976, expresses interest only in Poeta en Nueva York, and attributes the popularity of Lorca to political motivations (the circumstances surrounding his death) and to “la musicalidad magis-tral de la parte menos interesante de su obra” [the magisterial musicality of the least interesting part of his work].33
dichot-omy of the neopopularist and the avant-garde Lorca has the unfortunate effect of understating the originality, complexity, and inherent difficulty of his seemingly more conventional works. It is only the existence of the avant-garde Lorca, in other words, that makes the neopopularist works seem transparent by comparison. Carnero himself suggests that Lorca’s poetry is stylistically as complex as that of other, similar poets of the same period, who never gained Lorca’s level of popularity. The difficulty of these poets was held against them, but an exception was made for Lorca.34Romancero gitano combines popularity and difficulty in exactly this way. The musicality of Lorca’s handling of the romance form, the popularity of a few of the simpler poems in this book (like the unfortu-nate “La casada infiel”), and the sheer familiarity of the book conspire to make this book seem much less challenging than it actually is.35
It is an irony of literary history that Lorca was not surrealist enough for Dalí and Buñuel, since after his death he became the model for “Spanish surrealism” in the United States. American admirers of Lorca typically do not distinguish strongly between the neopopular and the avant-garde Lorca in the first place. They tend to see the enigmatic and irrational images of Poema delcante jondo as more or less “surreal-istic.” Perhaps this view is not as erroneous as it might appear: Lorca himself invoked the duende in public readings of Poeta en Nueva York, associating the “black sounds” of the cante with the more avant-garde phase of his own poetry. While the poet himself felt ambivalent about his own popularity, he himself did not establish a rigid distinction between poetic works in different styles.
an intellectual poet looking for inspiration in the culture of a marginal group, not that of a gypsy cantaor.
Visions of Lorca’s poetry, both in Spain and internationally, are of-ten tinged with a certain orientalism, but Lorca’s own vision of the gyp-sies is already is that of an orientalist. Charnon-Deutsch points out the Lorca occupies the position of an intellectual patron of Caló [Gypsy] culture:
Lorca’s most famous collection of poems, Romancero gitano (Gypsy bal-lads), written between 1924 and 1927, also capitalized on Spanish fin-de- siècle escapism by sustaining the myth of a mysterious and tragic people living outside the confines of bourgeois society. By exalting the Gypsy as poetic subject, Lorca lent prestige to the community that would have in-ternational reverberations, but his relation to the actual Calés otherwise differed little from that of other señoritos whose patronage system was re-sponsible for perpetuating mercenary relations with Caló entertainers.36
Lorca published Poema del cante jondo in 1931, ten years after its actual composition, and he gave his famous duende lecture in Buenos Aires in 1933. In other words, he continued to exploit the gypsy theme well after the publication of Romancero gitano, despite his evident dis-comfort with the misconstrual of his position that would inevitably ensue.40 If he had wanted to dissociate himself from gypsy and Anda-lusian themes during the last phase of his career he could have done so much more emphatically, but the truth is that he remained engaged in the reinterpretation of the Andalusian myth to the end of his life, as is evident in one the last poetic works that he completed before his death, the posthumously published Diván del Tamarit.
The championing of the difficult, avant-garde Lorca against the more facile and popular poet, then, overlooks the complexity of the neopopularist work as well as the lack of a clear dividing line between poetic works of different types. Lorca is a paradoxical figure: if we view him as an inspired, duende-possessed poet, then he is equally inspired in Poema del cante jondo and in Poeta en Nueva York. If, on the other hand, we view him more as a self-aware architect, then we must recog-nize this quality in both the rural tragedies and the experimental plays. Whether we view Lorca as an intellectual who distrusted the intellect, or as naïf with profoundly intellectual intuitions, the apparent “clarity” of some of Lorca’s works only deepens the mystery.
Lorca, of course, we must also come to terms with Lorca’s own exploi-tation of seemingly simple modes.
The idea of Lorca as a well-read, self-conscious, and astute artist is tacitly assumed in the work of the best scholars and critics in the field, even when they do not feel the need to argue for this view explicitly. Nevertheless, more simplistic views of the poet persist in the popu-lar imagination and around the edges of Lorca schopopu-larship. It is still possible to hear weak presentations at otherwise respectable academic conferences that offer reductive and distorted readings of Lorca, falling back on all of the old clichés. Perhaps because of the legacy of Lorca’s problematic reception, a bad paper on Lorca tends to be much worse than the typically mediocre paper on almost any other modern Span-ish author. If the SpanSpan-ish professors giving such papers can fall victim to such pitfalls, so too can English-speaking readers of poetry whose knowledge of Lorca is mediated through American poets and transla-tors. It is not necessarily the case that these American popularizers of Lorca are unsubtle thinkers—although in a few cases they are—but that their reasons for valuing Lorca are specific to the context of U.S. literature and culture. What is sacrificed in the process, logically, is the Spanish cultural context of which Lorca formed a part. Their aim is not the scholarly one of understanding Lorca as he really is, or Lorca in the context of the larger Hispanic literary tradition.
were, to widely varying degrees, influenced by surrealism or by a cer-tain “surrealist atmosphere” in Spanish-language poetry during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Among these poets, Lorca was probably the least involved with surrealism itself: unlike Aleixandre or Cernuda, he never applied this label to his own work.
It might seem pedantic to insist on this more narrow, nominalist definition of surrealism, confining this label to those who actually participated in the international Surrealist movement headed by An-dré Breton.42 Paul Ilie, in a 1968 book, argued for the existence of a broader “Surrealist Mode” in Spanish literature.43 The problem with a broader defintion, however, is evident in Ilie’s choice of texts: if the term surrealist is cut loose from its ties to surrealism itself, then every-thing and anyevery-thing can fit into this category—even the plays of Valle-Inclán. Surrealism, the proper name of a particular movement within the avant-garde, becomes synonymous with the avant-garde itself, and thus loses its definitional core. This effect is greatly magnified in trans-lation: a poet like César Vallejo, who was actively hostile to surrealism, is still sometimes cited in the U.S. as a part of a wider Hispanic surreal-ism. The tendency among scholars writing after Ilie, then, has been to insist on more rigorous and historically grounded definitions.44
Despite the definitional clarity gained by separating Lorca from Surrealism, there are historical reasons that have made it impossible for me to leave behind this term in the writing of this book. It is easy to see why Lorca would have been seen as a surrealist from the U.S. per-spective. His association with Salvador Dalí and admiration for Joan Miró, the visual style of his own drawings, and the “irrational” imagery of Poet en Nueva York, made this identification all but inevitable. Since surrealism itself did not have a strong presence in American poetry during the modernist period, almost any poetry bearing the slightest resemblance to surrealism was likely to have been viewed as “surrealist” in the broadest sense, even if Lorca was the least surrealist of the poets influenced in broad terms by surrealism itself.
the 1970s. The debate about whether Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York was directly inspired by surrealism has been going on for many years, with nuanced arguments on either side. Anecdotal influence suggests that those not directly involved in this debate—specialists in other areas of Hispanic literature, for instance—continue to think of Lorca as a sur-realist to this day. The misidentification of Lorca and other Spanish- language poets as surrealists is, in some sense, a fait accompli. It is undeniably true that the historical Lorca, “Lorca himself,” was not a member of the movement, but it is also an historical fact that the term surrealism has been used in a looser, improper sense in Spain, Latin America, and the English-speaking world for many decades, to refer to many poets influenced by surrealism at one or two removes from André Breton’s movement.
A larger point to be made here is that current scholarly views of Lorca are not likely to line up neatly with popular ideas about his work that motivated American Lorquismo circa 1957. The belated publication of Lorca’s Sonetosdel amor oscuro in the 1980s provides another exam-ple of this temporal gap.45 These openly homoerotic sonnets were not available to gay poets of the 1950s like Duncan, Spicer, O’Hara, and Ginsberg. This sequence of sonnets is highly significant for anyone wanting to understand Lorca’s work, but its late publication prevented it having an impact on the development of American poetry at mid-century.46
In any case, the neobaroque formalism of Lorca’s late sonnets might not have appealed to the American poets who took up his cause in the 1950s, who were mostly interested in finding alternatives to the metri-cal verse of the “academic” poets of their own time. For American poets, Lorca represented “deep song” and “Spanish surrealism.” It is sig-nificant that among poets of the generation that created the American Lorca, only Jerome Rothenberg has returned to a work of Lorca’s that was not available to readers during the 1950s and 1960s, in his transla-tion of the Suites (see chapter 7).
2 THE AMERICAN AGENDA
What is it you have come to tell me, Garcia Lorca? Asleep in the tear-staind moon you are
not poet, not lover, but one of the dead ones who inhabit the moon.
RobeRt Duncan1
Of the poems, let me use Lorca’s term: duende is that faculty of making / into which you subsume yourself, your nickel, your dime, your cruzeiro, your five-dollar gold piece, your talent, your silver mark, or dernier, a goddamn ha’penny, if that’s all you’re carrying around in your pocket that day, you lay it on the line, it’s payment, to whatever devil or demon wishes (with that idea or feeling IT feels itself itself, it’s [sic] owner, if you like) to take possession of the THING in you, giving that quality to the process. Paul blackbuRn2
I. COLD WAR LORCA
Accounts of Lorca’s influence in the United States have often been cel-ebratory, emphasizing the inspiration that American poets have taken from their Spanish precursor. My own perspective is more skeptical: it is not that Lorca has had a negative effect on American poetry, but that he has been Americanized beyond recognition, made to serve a variety of domestic interests. One of the “scandals of translation,” ac-cording to Lawrence Venuti, is its ability to decontextualize a foreign literature:
foreign literatures, canons that conform to domestic esthetic values and therefore reveal exclusions and admissions, centers and peripheries that deviate from those current in the foreign language.3
This is exactly what has happened to Lorca in the United States: he has become the archetypal Spanish poet for American readers, at the center of a new canon of poetry-in-translation that would be unrecog-nizable to a Spanish literary historian.
Venuti is rightly suspicious of this domestication. It should be pointed out, though, that the original canon in the foreign language arises out of an analogous process of “exclusions and admissions, cen-ters and peripheries”: in this sense translation is not the distortion of an original state of grace (defined in and by the source culture), but rather an additional complication of an already messy situation. As we saw in the last chapter, it is impossible to return to Spain to find “Lorca himself.” Understood within the context of Spanish literary history, the poet already bears the impossible burden of having to represent a cultural essence. If American readers are wrong to see him as the embodiment of Romantic Spain, they are wrong in exactly the way that many Spaniards have been. Furthermore, there is no firm line of demarcation between the national (Spanish) and the international reception of Lorca, whether among scholars, poets, or ordinary read-ers. Many of the most prominent scholars in this field are Spaniards or Latin Americans living in the English-speaking world, or else natives of the United States, the British Isles, France, and Italy. Lorca’s interna-tional celebrity has kept pace with his canonical status within Spanish literature, and his poetic influence has been stronger in the United States than in Spain during the cold war period.
translators than the scholarly task of situating him within the context of Spanish literary history. This is true even of more recent translators: Mark Statman and Pablo Medina, for example, situate their 2008 ver-sion of Poet in New York against the backdrop of the events of Septem-ber 11, 2001.4 Is this an act of cultural appropriation, in which a foreign
text is made to serve a specifically domestic agenda? Obviously it is. Yet Lorca’s book was written in New York, and was first published there in 1940 in a bilingual edition, long before it became available to readers in Spain. From this perspective, Poet in New York could be considered a hybrid work, one that properly belongs neither to Spanish nor to American literature.
Despite his early fame in the English-speaking world, Lorca did not attain truly iconic status within American culture until the 1950s.5
The first book-length translations were British rather than American: A.L. Lloyd’s Lament for the Death of the Bullfighter (1937) and Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili’s The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca (1939). Contemporary American reviews of both volumes emphasized the primitive “barbarity” of Lorca’s poetry, its roots in a folkloric tradi-tion of Southern Spain. In the case of Lloyd, the reviewers were taking their cues from the translator’s own preface when they refer to a poetry “inspired by the primitive, dramatic and exotic folk poetry of Anda-lusia, by the cante hondo and cante flamenco, the bitter, barbarous folk music of the South.”6 Although the American reception of Lorca gave
prominence to this “folkloric” dimension from the very beginning, the notion of the duende, which later became synonymous with Lorca’s po-etics for most American readers, was not used in the United States un-til 1955. My discussion of this key concept, then, will come at the end of this chapter rather than the beginning. In some sense, the duende represents the fossilization of American Lorquismo, its definitive trans-formation into a kind of orientialist kitsch. In contrast, the process that precedes this fossilization is more fluid and dynamic.
tradi-tion, beginning with the anonymous medieval epic ElCantar del Mío Cid. Placing Lorca against the backdrop of literary history, he empha-sizes national identity (Lorca as a prototypically Spanish writer) and the development of a vernacular, indigenous poetics.7 Williams, too, was
engaged in a lifelong struggle to develop a national poetics based on the “American idiom”: Lorca serves as an implicit model for this project, although Williams himself does not make this connection explicit.
Edwin Honig’s 1944 García Lorca, one of the first book-length stud-ies of the poet in English, also situates Lorca in relation to several major strands of his Spanish and specifically Andalusian literary heri-tage, especially the medieval cancionero, Baroque poetry, and the cante jondo.8 While interest in Lorca grows throughout the 1950s and 1960s,
later poets do not tend to offer such richly contextualized views of Lorca. Whatever domestic interests they might have had, both Williams and Honig are explicitly oriented toward the foreign context (Lorca in Spain) rather than to their own explicit agenda. Later writers tend to look at Lorca more selfishly, as a source for their own projects, and hence feel less of a need for historical contextualization.
Along with Honig’s historically significant García Lorca, the 1940s also saw Rolfe Humphries’s translation of Poet in New York, which was actually the first edition of the work in any language.9 New Directions
also brought out a version of Lorca’s Three Tragedies in 1947.Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer first became aware of Lorca in the latter years of this decade, as did Kenneth Koch, while a student at Harvard, and Jerome Rothenberg, who was still a high school student.10 In my view,
the period of Lorca’s greatest impact on American poetry stretches roughly from the late 1940s or early 1950s to the early 1970s: roughly from the 1951 publication of Langston Hughes’s Gypsy Ballads to Rob-ert Bly’s 1973 Jiménez & Lorca: Selected Poems. The high-water mark for American Lorquismo occurs in a shorter period between 1955, with the publication of Lorca’s Selected Poems in New Directions, and the early to mid-1960s, with the founding of the deep image school.11
anthology: the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, and the Black Mountain poets. In a follow-up volume, The Poetics of the New American Poetry (1973), Allen and coeditor War-ren Tallman included a translation of Lorca’s lecture on the duende alongside the contributions of American poets—the only text not by an Anglophone writer in this book. It should be noted that such manifestoes and statements of poetics are extremely significant both in the American and the Spanish literary traditions. Beginning in the 1920s, many anthologies of Spanish poetry include a “poética” by each poet, a prose statement of his or her intentions. In parallel fashion, the avant-garde tradition in the United States also relies heavily on prose justifications.
Of course, Lorca was also a guiding spirit for deep image poetry—a tendency not represented in The New American Poetry. The so-called Academic poets of this period, working in the tradition of Yeats and Auden, were less interested in Lorca, although some of these, like Don-ald Hall, later drifted into the orbit of deep image poetry and translated a few Lorca poems. “Confessional” poets (Lowell, Snodgrass, Plath, Berryman, Sexton) were also indifferent to Lorca.12
North American Lorquismo during this period had a musical di-mension too, most notably in the compositions of George Crumb, who devoted himself to Lorca during a long stretch of time.13 On a
more popular level, the Canadian poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen also became an intensely committed aficionado of the Span-ish poet, going so far as to name his daughter Lorca Cohen.14 “Take
This Waltz,” based on a translation of “Pequeño vals vienés,” is one of Cohen’s best-known songs. Joan Baez recorded versions of two Lorca poems on her 1968 spoken-word album Baptism.15 The entry of Lorca
also interested in flamenco and the folk music of Spain. The same sort of person who listened to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain might also have picked up a copy of Lorca’s Selected Poems or Belitt’s translation of The Poet in New York.
I view the poets, musicians, and artists of the Cold War period as the originators of what we now know as multiculturalism, and Lorca as one of the first multicultural heroes of American culture. He has been invoked, at one time or another, as a patron saint of anti-Fascist and anticapitalist politics, African American and gay male identities, the poetics of the new American poetry, ethnopoetics, urban working-class experience, and the Jungian-inspired deep image. The common ele-ment in these varied uses is a resistance to the conformity and repres-sion of cold war America: Lorca is likely to appear wherever there is a search for cultural alternatives to the ideology of the McCarthy era.
Multiculturalism represents an openness both to international in-fluences (Zen Buddhism, flamenco) and to the cultural diversity of the United States itself (jazz, Native American culture), as well as to lim-inal spaces, hybrid identities, and immigrant experiences. The desire to assimilate outside influences into the culture of the United States is not incompatible with a particular brand of “American exceptionalism” that arose in the postwar period. American cultural nationalism of the cold war was not isolationist or nativist in spirit, but expansionist, co-lonialist (just like U.S. foreign policy in the political arena). The typi-cal poet of the 1950s, who might have been drawing inspiration from Mayan culture, Spanish-language poetry, or Zen Buddhism, was also quite likely to identify strongly with the overtly nationalist aesthetics of Walt Whitman, Williams Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, or Jackson Pollock.16 There is a complex dialectic at work in this cultural
The phenomenon known as American exceptionalism is often iden-tified with nativist tendencies in American civic life dating back to the Puritans. In the nineteenth century, “American exceptionalism held that the United States was possessed of a sacred mission to bring the Protestant, democratic institutions and the system of free capitalism to all of the regions of North America, and beyond.”17 In a broader sense,
however, the term encompasses other, not quite so nefarious theories of American cultural uniqueness and difference from Europe, includ-ing those developed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other writers of the American renaissance, and later by American pragmatist philosophers like William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey.18 During
the cold war, the anticommunism of the McCarthyist right and the emerging counterculture of the beat generation are both exceptionalist in spirit. John Lardas argues, convincingly to my mind, that “the per-spective from which the Beats should be evaluated is from within the myth of American exceptionalism. Their aversion to dominant mark-ers of American might was not outright rejection of the American way of life but a reconfiguration of its content.”19 Following Lardas, we
can find currents of exceptionalism among postwar novelists and poets (Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Charles Olson, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara), in abstract expressionist painting, and in the music of John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Duke Ellington. The field of American studies, not coincidentally, also acquires its mod-ern configuration during the cold war period, and is founded on the presupposition of the uniqueness of the United States with respect to other Western nations.20
celebra-tion of the American hunger for representacelebra-tions of cultural otherness can be merely self-serving. My own approach is to situate American ex-ceptionalism in its historical context and to subject it to a sympathetic but skeptical critical reading. Although I find the reception of Lorca in the United States to be fraught with problems, a simple condemna-tion of the colonialist impulse within postwar American culture is too blunt an instrument.
The first paradox that must be explained is how a poet like Lorca can be assimilated into a peculiarly American project. The problem is not merely that Lorca is a foreign poet, but that he has been strongly identified with another ideology of national exceptionalism. For Span-iards and non-SpanSpan-iards alike, Lorca has traditionally represented the peculiarity, the essential uniqueness of Spanish culture. In his intro-duction to Langston Hughes’s version of the Gypsy Ballads, Robert H. Glauber articulates this widely shared perspective: “Lorca’s literary output is a microcosm of Spanish history, thought and behavior. He was an observer whose ethnic instincts were developed to a prodigious degree. In him, the Spanish racial memory found its perfect spokes-man.”21 We can infer that Glauber wanted to draw a parallel between
Lorca and Langston Hughes as “ethnic” or “racial” poets. This appeal to biological essences is embarrassingly dated, but it cannot be attributed to Glauber’s nationality. Writing from Franco’s Spain, Dámaso Alonso, the preeminent literary scholar of his time and a onetime friend of Lorca, arrives at an almost identical conclusion—Lorca, like Goya and other emblematic figures, represents a volcanic eruption of the quintes-sence of Spanish culture: “His is the torrential genius of Spain which bursts forth from time to time, producing strange contorted beings, visionaries whose power of expression in national as well as universal terms reaches the highest conceivable peak.”22
could provide an implicit model for an alternative construction of American culture. Ralph Ellison concludes his essay on flamenco with the statement that “Americans have long found in Spanish culture a clar-ifying perspective on their own.”23 The insight is a crucial one, though
unfortunately Ellison does not provide additional examples; he might have been thinking of Washington Irving’s Tales from the Alhambra or of Longfellow’s interest in Spanish literature. Like Spain, the United States can be seen as a nation on the margins of European culture, with its own vernacular traditions and fiercely independent national char-acter. Even the contrasts between American and Spanish myths of na-tional identity are usefully symmetrical. Both nations are held to be “barbaric,” Spain in its primitivist oldness and the United States in its aboriginal newness (Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”). Both myths of na-tional character also emphasize extreme individualism, although with opposite results in the political sphere: freedom and democracy, in the case of the United States, and recalcitrance to industrial modernity and democratic institutions, in Spain. The Protestant Puritanism of the United States functions as the photographic negative of Spain’s intense Catholicism, while Spanish America, colonized by Spain rather than by England, represents an alternative historical destiny, one that the United States might have followed under different circumstances.
The convergence of two powerful myths of national uniqueness cre-ated the climate in which Lorca could become an emblematic figure in the United States.24 Ideas of cultural uniqueness and national destiny
are themselves the product of nineteenth-century romanticism, and the most striking element in American Lorquismo is its unapologetically ro-mantic enthusiasm. Lorca appeals to multiple constituencies: he is de-motic, folkoric, primitive, and telluric. As a demotic figure, a man of the people, Lorca represents a politically progressive image in tune with a certain segment of the American left. His interest in the folkore native to a particular soil anticipates the interests of American enthusiasts of folk traditions. Lorca is also seen as a primitive poet, in touch with pri-mordial, telluric forces, and thus a shamanic, almost religious, figure.
The romantic myth is hagiographic: it leaves little room for any criticism of Lorca, any sense that he might be a problematic or self-contradictory figure, or even that some of his works might be more aesthetically accomplished than others. A synthetic perspective brings into harmony aspects of Lorca’s work that, in a more critical view, would be treated as productive tensions if not contradictions. This is not to say that the American reception of Lorca is lacking in complex-ity, but it is a complexity of another sort, involving the negotiation of peculiarly American issues of identity rather than a critical scrutiny of such contradictions within Lorca’s work. As we will see below, even when these internal contradictions are quite evident, American poets are often willfully blind to them.
of the Belitt translation of The Poet in New York and of The New Ameri-can Poetry.
The speaker of Voznesensky’s poem emotes about Lorca in a way very similar to many American poets of this period: “I love Lorca. I love his name, hovering lightly like a boat, humming like a gal-lery in a theater, vibrating with the sensitivity of the moon-disk of a radio relay station; smelling as bitter and intense as orange rind. / Lorca!”25 Voznesensky goes on to milk Lorca’s death for its political
resonance: “Franco’s men killed him on the 18th of August, 1936. The murderers.”26
The Soviet poet’s homage to Lorca is not dissimilar to those of Amer-ican poets like Ginsberg or Duncan. Hollo singles out this poem for praise in his introduction, pointing to Lorca (“the visionary clarity and sharpness of his images”) as a major influence.27 Robert Creeley,
how-ever, wrote a negative review of The Selected Poems, comparing Vozne-sensky unfavorably to the Spanish poet. Not coincidentally, Creeley chooses a favorite Lorca poem of other American poets like Ginsberg, Duncan, and Wright:
Comparisons are deceptive, but Lorca’s use of America does make clear what Voznesensky’s tends to make bland. In “Ode to Walt Whitman,” for example, a language specific to the literal feeling occurs, and the revulsion felt by Lorca, in the pain of his experience, is explicit: “Agony, agony, dream, ferment and dream. / Such is the world, my friend, ag-ony, agony. / Corpses are decomposing under the clocks of cities; / war passes with a million grey rats weeping, / the rich give to their mistresses / small illuminated moribunds, / and life is not noble, nor good, nor sacred. . . .” Against this, Voznesensky’s response reads weakly:
. . . Under the firehose spouting out endless driveways my ears were turning like windmills
O godless gasoline poisonous America Coca-Cola and tolling bells . . . 28
the United States do, but he rejects the unsubtlety of the Russian poet’s vision of “poisonous America.”
II. LORCA IN BLACK AND WHITE
During the postwar period, both African American and gay male poets invoke Lorca in order to define their own versions of American excep-tionalism, versions that are both exceptional and highly representative of a broader cultural dynamic of the period. What is particularly relevant here is the way in which poets from these two subcategories invoke cold war themes in the process of affirming their own cultural identity. Two poems from Poet in New York, “Norm and Paradise of the Blacks” and “The King of Harlem,” have strongly resonated with African American poets. (The title of this first poem refers to Small’s Jazz Para-dise, a club that Lorca frequented during his sojourn in New York.) Nevertheless, the appeal of the “Black Lorca” to white poets cannot be discounted either, since African American experience was crucial to American self-definition of this period, in both popular and elite culture. Bebop became the preferred music of alienated white intellec-tuals, and successive generations of white teenagers, beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the present, have adopted modes of speech and personal style with their origins in black culture: the hip-sters of the 1940s and 1950s are the direct ancestors of the hippies of the late 1960s. In 1957, Norman Mailer expounded his view of the “White Negro”: “The hipster had absorbed the existential synapses of the ne-gro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white negro.”29
Frank O’Hara, in his “Answer to Voznesensky and Evtushenko,” could write “I consider myself to be black and you not even part.”30 Like
Creeley, he rejects what he feels is the crudity of the Soviet view of American culture, which ignores its racial hybridity.
with his or her own distinctive voice within the larger group, exempli-fied a uniquely American form of cultural expression, the presumptive antithesis of collectivist Soviet communism.32 The irony, which was
not lost on the musicians themselves, was that African Americans rep-resented ideals of American freedom and racial tolerance abroad while remaining subject to discrimination at home.33
Jazz was key for both black and white writers of the postwar period in the formation of new forms of American cultural exceptionalism. The State Department’s jazz tours made savvy use of some signifi-cant internal tensions within American culture: while the conserva-tive mainstream culture of the 1950s pretended to despise hipsters and beatniks, abstract expressionism (“My kid could paint that!”), and other manifestions of the cultural avant-garde, the political and cul-ture elite recognized that this alternative culcul-ture was more vital and dynamic. While the State Department sent jazz musicians abroad, the CIA promoted abstract expressionism—more covertly, but for identi-cal motives.34
The similarity between Lorca’s treatment of the gypsies in Gypsy Ballads and Poem of the Deep Song and his vision of African Americans in Poet in New York is a critical cliché on both sides of the Atlantic. (I first heard this idea in a class taught by the Spanish poet José Luis Cano, a friend of Lorca himself, in 1980.) What has made this analogy especially convincing is the exceptional role that both groups play in the cultural exceptionalism of their respective nations. Despite their social marginality (or perhaps because of this marginal status) these two racial minorities play a significant role in the foreign projections of their respective cultures, especially in the musical arena. Spain has exported flamenco to the rest of the world, just as the United States has exported jazz and blues. The conventional notion is that flamenco singers and dancers express the soulful essence of Spain, in the same way that equally soulful black musicians embody a peculiarly (African) American essence.
