Posted Monday morning, July 8, 2019.
“His pain fueled poems of melancholy longing and stage tragedies of disastrously failed love…: Scene from James Madison University’s student production of “Blood Wedding” by Federico García Lorca, Spring 2009. Set design and photo copyright Richard Finkelstein.
Born in 1898 to a well-off family in a village near Grenada, Lorca had grown up to be a gifted musician, pathbreaking poet, theater-filling dramatist, and unparalled party guest. His personality was so contagious that when a young Salvador Dali first met Lorca in college, the painter would literally run away from him to battle in private his jealousy of the Grenadine’s charisma. By the time he was in his mid-thirties, Lorca was one of the most-beloved Spanish language writers alive. Alongisde his literary peers, the Generation of ‘27, he reinvigorated Spanish poetry, bringing artistic innovations from the rest of Europe into harmony with Spain’s folkloric traditions, especially that of his native Andalusia with its rich Gypsy influences. The Chilean poet Pabol Neruda wrote onf his friend Lorca: “I have never seen grace and genius, a winged heart and a crystalline waterfall, come together in anyone else as they did in him.”
Behind that shimmiering waterfall, however, Lorca inhabited a fragile, shadowy inner world. As a gay man in a steadfastly homophobic society, he was never able to express his true self in all its complexity, perhaps te worst fate imaginable for someone as torrentially expressive as Lorca. His pain fueled poems of melancholy longing and stage tragedies of disastrously failed love…
---from “The Age of Disenchantments” by Aaron Shulman.
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