Lorca’s personality – the distinguishing characteristics of the man as they relate to his life story – weighs heavily, it seems, on the criticism of his work. ‘García Lorca’, writes Paul Julian Smith, ‘is perhaps the most extreme case of proprietorial authorship in Spanish literature: it seems impossible to approach his texts without acknowledging his person, and it is almost an article of faith amongst critics that in Lorca literature and life are one.’¹ For Smith, writing in the late 1980s, the problem with Lorca criticism is that it has sought in his work characteristics of homogeneity and uniformity by which to...

In an essay on one of his brother’s plays, Francisco García Lorca points out that, although a ‘process of maturation is visible in the work of all artists’, there is no ‘clear line of evolution’ in Federico’s work. ‘As a poet and as a playwright, what Federico undergoes is a continuous metamorphosis,’ rather than a clear evolution in any one direction. What he does is to ‘adapt technical procedures to artistic intentions that vary with every work’.¹ Luis Fernández Cifuentes adds a further warning about sweeping generalizations: that Lorca’s critics seem to be on a continual, reductive search for totality,...

In close-shot, a bloodied bullet is submerged in a glass of water. The anguished strains ofcante jondo[deep song] erupt into the surround sound. This sequence forms the opening titles of Marcos Zurinaga’s 1996 filmMuerte en Granada[Death in Granada], released in the US asThe Disappearance of García Lorca. Hollywood actor Andy García steps into the role of the poet and playwright to recreate the circumstances surrounding Lorca’s murder. The film is a noirish thriller. It features a journalist-cum-literary critic turned detective, who becomes embroiled in a plot involving the same suspects responsible for Lorca’s death years...

‘La actividad más importante en la vida de Federico García Lorca, fuera de la literatura, fue la música’ [Apart from literature, the most important activity in the life of Federico García Lorca was music].¹ If we think of Lorca before the age of eighteen, however, then we could with justice invert the priorities in Federico de Onís’s statement. In the years leading up to 1916 the future writer proved himself an immensely talented, if not precocious, musician. Several ancestors on his father’s side had been similarly accomplished: his great-grandfather, Antonio García Vargas, was a singer and guitarist and one of...

Encouraged by Salvador Dalí, Lorca exhibited a number of his drawings at the Dalmau Gallery, Barcelona, between 25 June and 2 July 1927. By exhibiting at the Dalmau he was following in the steps of artists such as Gleizes, Gris, Laurencin, Metzinger, Duchamp, Picasso, Miró, Barradas, Picabia and Dalí himself. Twenty-four drawings were shown.¹ Seven of them were clearly attempts to take advantage of the technical conquests of Cubism and form an interesting collection since they are the only Cubist still-lives that Lorca ever produced (see, for example, Figure 1:Teorema de la Copa y la Mandolina[Theorem of the...

Apollinaire’s 1917 bugle-call for his fellow poets to work in the cinema heralded an artistic association that would have a lasting impact in the shaping of the European film tradition.

However, among the art forms poetry is arguably the least compatible with cinema, particularly from the current vantage point of a film industry dominated by the action movie. In addition, the narrative drive that the language of film imposes on images puts a limit to their connotative potential. The fact, moreover, that poetry is essentially a linguistic discourse makes it irreducible to the visual image that defines the medium of...

In this chapter we will refer to both religious belief and practice: to questions of a theological and metaphysical nature, relating to Christianity and other religions; and to ways in which religious belief impinges on people’s lives, as individuals and as members of societies. Such an approach accommodates Lorca’s central conviction, shared with Nietzsche, that ‘ God is dead’, and his exploration of the human consequences of that. Art may assuage where metaphysics fails to satisfy. Considered within a context of the history of ideas, Lorca’s is not an unusual case, given central trends of Spanish liberal thought: many serious-minded...

In Act III ofEl público[The Public, orThe Audience] Julieta – Shakespeare’s Juliet – distances herself from her role within a role to exclaim ‘Ya estoy cansada y me levanto a pedir auxilio para arrojar de mi sepulcro a los que teorizan sobre mi corazón y a los que me abren la boca con pequeñas pinzas de mármol’ [I’m tired and I’m getting up from here to ask for help to cast out from my tomb all those who probe my heart with theories and open up my mouth with tiny marble pincers].¹ She longs for a moment when she...

In order to understand Lorca’s politics we need to set him in the context of his times and to consider the events that shaped the sensibilities of the entire generation of writers to which he belonged. It is true that the collective experience cannot fully explain the sense of every individual case but it can legitimately draw attention to the range of social and historical circumstances to which all alert intellectuals of those years responded, directly or indirectly, positively or negatively, as they took stock of their place in the world and tried to define their role in it. Lorca...