NPM: Lorca's Lament

Today we'll be looking a piece by Federico García Lorca (1898 - 1936), another poet I've never really explored until recently. I knew his name from one of my favorite Allen Ginsberg pieces, where he makes a cameo appearance with Walt Whitman. After reading through an old Lorca collection I found in the library downstairs (wow -- now that I notice, this copy's from the first printing), the connection seems so obvious. If we were dealing with a fossil record, Lorca would appear as the missing link between Whitman and Ginsberg. I used to believe Ginsberg was the 20th century reincarnation of Whitman, but now it seems more likely that he's actually an American incarnation of Lorca. (Compare: Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman" and "The King of Harlem" (link is to an incomplete transcription) with "Supermarket in California," and, really, pretty much everything else collected in Howl and Other Poems.)

The poem we'll be reading (or skimming, or skipping, or whichever gives you the most pleasure) was written to commemorate his friend Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1891 - 1934), a poet, actor, and bullfighter who sustained a fatal goring by a bull named Granadino. It's a long one, but it's rather lovely -- and like yesterday, we see a lyrical refrain being put to good use.


Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias
(Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili)

   1. Cogida and Death

At five in the afternoon.

It was exactly five in the afternoon.

A boy brought the white sheet

at five in the afternoon.

A frail of lime ready prepared

at five in the afternoon.

The rest was death, and death alone.

The wind carried away the cottonwool

at five in the afternoon.

And the oxide scattered crystal and nickel

at five in the afternoon.

Now the dove and the leopard wrestle

at five in the afternoon.

And a thigh with a desolate horn

at five in the afternoon.

The bass-string struck up

at five in the afternoon.

Arsenic bells and smoke

at five in the afternoon.

Groups of silence in the corners

at five in the afternoon.

And the bull alone with a high heart!

At five in the afternoon.

When the sweat of snow was coming

at five in the afternoon,

when the bull ring was covered with iodine

at five in the afternoon.

Death laid eggs in the wound

at five in the afternoon.

At five in the afternoon.

Exactly at five o'clock in the afternoon.

A coffin on wheels is his bed

at five in the afternoon.

Bones and flutes resound in his ears

at five in the afternoon.

Now the bull was bellowing through his forehead

at five in the afternoon.

The room was iridescent with agony

at five in the afternoon.

In the distance the gangrene now comes

at five in the afternoon.

Horn of the lily through green groins

at five in the afternoon.

The wounds were burning like suns

at five in the afternoon,

and the crowd was breaking the windows

at five in the afternoon.

At five in the afternoon.

Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon!

It was five by all the clocks!

It was five in the shade of the afternoon!

   2. The Spilled Blood

I will not see it!

Tell the moon to come,

for I do not want to see the blood

of Ignacio on the sand.

I will not see it!

The moon wide open.

Horse of still clouds,

and the grey bull ring of dreams

with willows in the barreras.

I will not see it!

Let my memory kindle!

Warm the jasmines

of such minute whiteness!

I will not see it!

The cow of the ancient world

passed her sad tongue

over a snout of blood

spilled on the sand,

and the bulls of Guisando,

partly death and partly stone,

bellowed like two centuries

sated with threading the earth.

No.

I do not want to see it!

I will not see it!

Ignacio goes up the tiers

with all his death on his shoulders.

He sought for the dawn

but the dawn was no more.

He seeks for his confident profile

and the dream bewilders him

He sought for his beautiful body

and encountered his opened blood.

I will not see it!

I do not want to hear it spurt

each time with less strength:

that spurt that illuminates

the tiers of seats, and spills

over the corduroy and the leather

of a thirsty multitude.

Who shouts that I should come near!

Do not ask me to see it!

His eyes did not close

when he saw the horns near,

but the terrible mothers

lifted their heads.

And across the ranches,

an air of secret voices rose,

shouting to celestial bulls,

herdsmen of pale mist.

There was no prince in Seville

who could compare to him,

nor sword like his sword

nor heart so true.

Like a river of lions

was his marvellous strength,

and like a marble torso

his firm drawn moderation.

The air of Andalusian Rome

gilded his head

where his smile was a spikenard

of wit and intelligence.

What a great torero in the ring!

What a good peasant in the sierra!

How gentle with the sheaves!

How hard with the spurs!

How tender with the dew!

How dazzling the fiesta!

How tremendous with the final

banderillas of darkness!

But now he sleeps without end.

Now the moss and the grass

open with sure fingers

the flower of his skull.

And now his blood comes out singing;

singing along marshes and meadows,

sliding on frozen horns,

faltering soulless in the mist

stumbling over a thousand hoofs

like a long, dark, sad tongue,

to form a pool of agony

close to the starry Guadalquivir.

Oh, white wall of Spain!

Oh, black bull of sorrow!

Oh, hard blood of Ignacio!

Oh, nightingale of his veins!

No.

I will not see it!

No chalice can contain it,

no swallows can drink it,

no frost of light can cool it,

nor song nor deluge of white lilies,

no glass can cover it with silver.

No.

I will not see it!!

   3. The Laid Out Body

Stone is a forehead where dreams grieve

without curving waters and frozen cypresses.

Stone is a shoulder on which to bear Time

with trees formed of tears and ribbons and planets.

I have seen grey showers move towards the waves

raising their tender riddled arms,

to avoid being caught by lying stone

which loosens their limbs without soaking their blood.

For stone gathers seed and clouds,

skeleton larks and wolves of penumbra:

but yields not sounds nor crystals nor fire,

only bull rings and bull rings and more bull rings without walls.

Now, Ignacio the well born lies on the stone.

All is finished. What is happening? Contemplate his face:

death has covered him with pale sulphur

and has place on him the head of dark minotaur.

All is finished. The rain penetrates his mouth.

The air, as if mad, leaves his sunken chest,

and Love, soaked through with tears of snow,

warms itself on the peak of the herd.

What is they saying? A stenching silence settles down.

We are here with a body laid out which fades away,

with a pure shape which had nightingales

and we see it being filled with depthless holes.

Who creases the shroud? What he says is not true!

Nobody sings here, nobody weeps in the corner,

nobody pricks the spurs, nor terrifies the serpent.

Here I want nothing else but the round eyes

to see his body without a chance of rest.

Here I want to see those men of hard voice.

Those that break horses and dominate rivers;

those men of sonorous skeleton who sing

with a mouth full of sun and flint.

Here I want to see them. Before the stone.

Before this body with broken reins.

I want to know from them the way out

for this captain stripped down by death.

I want them to show me a lament like a river

which will have sweet mists and deep shores,

to take the body of Ignacio where it looses itself

without hearing the double panting of the bulls.

Loses itself in the round bull ring of the moon

which feigns in its youth a sad quiet bull,

loses itself in the night without song of fishes

and in the white thicket of frozen smoke.

I don't want to cover his face with handkerchiefs

that he may get used to the death he carries.

Go, Ignacio, feel not the hot bellowing.

Sleep, fly, rest: even the sea dies!

   4. Absent Soul

The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,

nor the horses, nor the ants in your own house.

The child and the afternoon do not know you

because you have died for ever.

The shoulder of the stone does not know you,

nor the black satin in which you crumble.

Your silent memory does not know you

because you have died for ever.

The autumn will come with small white snails,

misty grapes and with clustered hills,

but no one will look into your eyes

because you have died for ever.

Because you have died for ever,

like all the dead of the Earth,

like all the dead who are forgotten

in a heap of lifeless dogs.

Nobody knows you. No. But I sing of you.

For posterity I sing of your profile and grace.

Of the signal maturity of your understanding.

Of your appetite for death and the taste of its mouth.

Of the sadness of your once valiant gaiety.

It will be a long time, if ever, before there is born

an Andalusian so true, so rich in adventure.

I sing of his elegance with words that groan,

and I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees.