We explain who Federico García Lorca was, what his contributions to Spanish and Latin American literature were, and what his tragic fate was.
Federico García Lorca was the most famous and popular Spanish poet of the 20th century.
Who was Federico García Lorca?
Federico García Lorca was a Spanish poet, playwright and musician, considered one of the most outstanding and important figures of Spanish culture of the 20th century. In his barely 19-year literary career, He composed some of the most celebrated poems and plays in contemporary Spanish literature.who contributed to revitalizing the literary tradition in their language.
In addition, Garcia Lorca He was a prominent member of the so-called “generation of ’27”, an avant-garde literary movement which included authors such as Pedro Salinas (1891-1951), Luis Cernuda (1902-1963), Dámaso Alonso (1898-1990) and Rafael Alberti (1902-1999), among others. It was a heterogeneous group of authors who defended an intellectual literature, far from sentimentalism, and who artistically relieved the famous “generation of ’98”.
The figure of Garcia Lorca It is associated with the struggle between the liberal and conservative sectors of society.a tragic opposition that led Spain to a bloody civil war between 1936 and 1939.
At 38 years of age, García Lorca was arrested by conservative troops during the civil war and accused of espionage and immorality. He was shot without trial and his body buried in a mass grave, whose whereabouts are still unknown. His disappearance is emblematic of the horrors experienced in Spain at the time.
Birth and youth of Federico García Lorca
Federico of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Garcia Lorca He was born on June 5, 1898 in Fuente Vaquerosin the Spanish province of Granada, Andalusia. He was the first of four children born to landowner Federico García Rodríguez and his second wife, Vicenta Lorca Romero.
His family was wealthy and as a child Federico had tutors and piano instructors, and at the age of ten he was enrolled in a private institute in the city of Granada. There he received a secular education, complementary to the Catholic education of the Spanish public school.In that same city he began his university education in 1914, but more than law, philosophy and literature, his true passion at that time seemed to be music, since he played the piano with skill.
His university studies, however, awakened new interests in him. He began to frequent a gathering called “El Rinconcillo” at the famous Gran Café Granada (now Café Alameda), where he met with other students to debate. And with the help of the professor and writer from Granada, Martín Domínguez Berrueta (1869-1920), he travelled to many Spanish landscapes such as Córdoba, León, Burgos, Castilla, among others.
Impressions and landscapes It was the first book published by García Lorca.
These trips made such an impression on the young García Lorca that he tried to describe them in his first book., Impressions and landscapesa small prose anthology published in 1918, on political and aesthetic subjects of interest to him. However, his true intellectual formation took place the following year, in the Spanish capital, when he entered the famous Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid.
Life in Madrid and the Generation of 27
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid was a meeting point for local and international intellectuals, as well as young Spanish talents. Between 1919 and 1926, García Lorca was associated with some of the greatest Spanish artists and writers of the timesuch as Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), Rafael Alberti (1902-1999), Jorge Guillén (1893-1984), Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958), Pedro Salinas (1891-1951) and Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), among others. With many of them he established a fruitful and significant friendship.
Immersed in this intellectual environment, García Lorca composed his first works of poetry, music and theatre.Between 1919 and 1921 he published Poetry bookthe play The curse of the butterfly and composed his first suitesshort, avant-garde poems in which he engaged in dialogue with folklore tradition, Japanese haiku and certain fashionable poetic trends.
Those early works never satisfied García Lorca. In fact, The curse of the butterfly It premiered in 1920 and was widely criticized and ridiculed, so the production closed after just four performances. Even so, The maturity of his talent was already evident in his way of combining local tradition with avant-garde trends..
In 1922 García Lorca collaborated with the Andalusian composer Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) in a festival of flamenco singing in Granada, and from that experience he composed Poem of cante jondo. He also became interested in popular puppet theatre and wrote the piece The Puppets of the Club.
However, The major productions of this period of his life were produced in collaboration with his friend Salvador Dalí.Between 1925 and 1928, Dalí and García Lorca worked together intensively. This was a very important relationship for García Lorca, in which he faced his feelings of homosexual love for the first time.On the other hand, his friend helped him to experiment more openly and daringly with words and painting, often close to surrealism.
García Lorca and Salvador Dalí established a fruitful and passionate friendship.
García Lorca then wrote some more “objective” poems, far from the sentimental tendency, such as those of songs (1924) or as “Ode to Salvador Dalí”, published in 1926 in Magazine of the WestThis “objectivist” poetic tendency led him and other colleagues to revalue the dispassionate poetry of Don Luis de Góngora (1561-1627), to whom they paid public homage in Seville, on the occasion of the tercentenary of his death in 1927. This is how the name “generation of 27” came about..
A Gypsy in New York
García Lorca, however, did not abandon his interest in theatre and Andalusian tradition. Between 1924 and 1928 he composed the plays The prodigious shoemaker, Don Perlimplín’s love for Belisa in his gardenand under the influence of Dalí, he exhibited a first selection of his drawings, of which he had hundreds of sketches saved.
That same year his famous book appeared Gypsy romancea work that marked his maturity as a poet. It was a lyrical compendium of 18 ballads inspired by traditional Spanish singing, whose first edition sold out within the first year of sale and catapulted García Lorca onto the national literary scene.
The success of Gypsy romancehowever, brought with it one of the deepest crises in García Lorca’s life. His fame was such that many pigeonholed the author into costumbrismo, or took him for a gypsy or defender of the gypsies, who were very poorly regarded in the society of the time. In addition, Her former friends Dalí and Buñuel harshly criticized the work, and she broke off her relationship with the sculptor Emilio Aladrén.. All this plunged García Lorca into depression, to which was added the prohibition of the premiere of his work Don Perlimplín’s love for Belisa in his garden by the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera (1870-1930) in 1929.
The Primo de Rivera dictatorship was a military regime that seized political power in Spain on 13 September 1923. Following a coup d’état led by the Captain General of Catalonia, Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja, the country was governed by a nationalist military junta that prohibited the speaking of languages other than Castilian, the use of Basque or Catalan flags, censored the press, and suspended constitutional guarantees and political elections. The de facto regime lasted until Primo de Rivera’s resignation in 1930.
So, García Lorca accepted a friend’s invitation to a trip to New York City in June 1929. He remained in that city until March of the following year and He wrote his famous collection of poems Poet in New Yorkwhich was not published until four years after his death.
Poet in New York represented a departure from the usual themes of García Lorca’s work: a collection of free verse poems, filled with hallucinatory images and portraits of urban decay and social inequalityThe collection engages in dialogue with the works of Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and TS Elliot (1888-1965), among other non-Hispanic poets.
During his trip to the United States and Cuba, García Lorca wrote some of his most famous verses.
García Lorca’s stay in New York was followed by a brief stay in Havana, where he wrote “El público”, a work in which he openly explores homosexual love. Finally, in 1930, the poet returned to Madrid.
The Barraca and the Civil War
In April 1931, the Second Spanish Republic was founded, with a socialist orientation, replacing the monarchy of Alfonso XIII. In this context, new cultural opportunities arose, thanks to the Ministry of Education. Among them, the creation of “La Barraca”, a university theatre group led by García Lorca and Eduardo Ugarte (1901-1955)writer and theatre director.
Since 1932, La Barraca has been dedicated to performing the great plays of the Spanish Golden Age theatre: works by Tirso de Molina (1579-1648), Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681), Lope de Vega (1562-1635) and Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). It was a travelling procession, whose objective was to bring classical Spanish theatre to the most remote corners of the country.
La Barraca was a traveling theater group that performed plays from the Spanish Golden Age.
Those were very productive years for García Lorca. Not only for his successful hosting of La Barraca, but because he produced a good part of his most famous works. Some of them were Blood Weddingpremiered in Buenos Aires in 1933 with Lorca himself in the presence; Barren, Bernarda Alba’s house either Lamentation for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias.
The work of La Barraca, however, received criticism from the conservative sector, which accused it of being “socialist propaganda,” and García Lorca himself was defamed and insulted by the Catholic press, which mocked his homosexuality.. Eventually, he was considered an “enemy of the right”, given his friendship with important artists and intellectuals of the time affiliated with the left, such as Rafael Alberti, Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) and Salvador Novo (1904-1974), and with progressive Spanish politicians such as Fernando de los Ríos (1879-1949).
The social and political situation in Spain was extremely tense and in July 1936 a military uprising took place which unleashed the bloody Spanish Civil War. The last performance of La Barraca took place in the spring of that year, at the Ateneo de Madrid. And despite receiving offers of diplomatic asylum from Colombia and Mexico, García Lorca decided to return to his family.. I was in the Huerta de San Vicente, in Granada,…