Federico García Lorca: Life, Works, and Legacy
Federico García Lorca
(Fuente Vaqueros, Spain, 1898 – Víznar, id., 1936)
Spanish poet and playwright.
The first years of childhood spent in Federico García Lorca rural environment of his small town of Granada, and then go on to study at a school in Almería.
He continued his studies at the University of Granada: he studied philosophy and literature and graduated in law. In college he was befriended by Manuel de Falla, who exercised a great influence on him, transmitting his love of folklore and popular.
After 1919, he moved to Madrid at the Residencia de Estudiantes, where he met Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez, and befriended poets and artists of his generation as Bunuel and Dali. In this environment, Lorca had a passion not only poetry but also to music and drawing, and became interested in theater. However, his first play, The Curse of the butterfly, was a failure.
In 1921 he published his first work in verse, Book of poems, which, despite accusing the romantic and modernist influences, gain attention. However, the recognition and literary success of Federico Garcia Lorca arrived with the publication in 1927, Song and, above all, with acclaimed performances in Madrid and continued de Mariana Pineda, patriotic drama.
Between 1921 and 1924, while working on songs, wrote a play based on Andalusian folklore, the Poema del cante flamenco (published in 1931), a book and more unitary and matured, with which first experiences what will be a feature of his poetry: the identification with the popular and learned later stylization, and led to full maturity with the Gypsy Ballads (1928), which was an immediate success. It merged the popular and sing worship for people persecuted gypsies, outcasts marked by a tragic destiny. Formally, Lorca got a personal language, unmistakable, that resides in the assimilation of popular elements and shapes combined with bold metaphors, and self-stylization of the forms of pure poetry that was labeled his generation.
Following this success, Lorca went to New York where he lived as an intern during the academic year 1929-1930. The impressions that the city printed in his mind materialized in Poeta en Nueva York (published posthumously in 1940), an anguished song, with echoes of social protest against the mechanized urban civilization today. Popular and traditional forms of his earlier works in this one give way to visions of apocalypse, made illogical, dreamlike images that tie in with current French Surrealist, but always within the personal poetry of Lorca.
Back in Spain, Federico García Lorca in 1932 was appointed director of La Barraca, university theater company that it intended to bring to people of Castile classical theater of the Golden Age His interest in theater, both in its creative and diffusion, corresponds to a progressive evolution towards collective and an effort to reach the most direct way possible to the people. So the last years of his life were dedicated to drama, with the exception of two books of poetry: Divan del Tamarit, collection of poems inspired by the poetry arabigoandaluza, and Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1936), dedicated to his beautiful elegy bullfighter friend, which combines the popular tone affiliation with surreal images.
The last works of Federico García Lorca are plays.Yerma (1934) is a real tragedy the classic manner, including the chorus of laundresses, with its coryphaeus a dialogue with the star discussing the action. Similar is the case in Bodas de Sangre (1933), where a real event inspired the drama of a bride who runs away after her marriage to an old boyfriend (Leonardo). The flight, full of premonitions, in which death appears as a character itself, points to a final that has been alluding to since the first scene, in which both men were killed, mowing the possibility of continuity of the lineage of both branches and renewing the groom’s father’s death at the hands of the family of Leonardo. Thus, the passion and AutoSeek end with the destruction of the entire order.
Among all these stresses La Casa de Bernarda Alba (1936), where the passion for the life of the young Adela, locked in her house with her sisters because of mourning for his father and oppressed under the yoke of a tyrannical mother, the rebel without fear of consequences. In this way, their passion for life will crash into the wall of incomprehension of her family all over, from their removal. Along with the figure of the protagonist, highlights the series of female portraits done by the author, from the very Bernarda confidant to the old servant of all (The Poncia), bitter and jealous sister (martyrdom) or grandmother who opposes mad Bernarda’s tyranny.
The House of Bernarda Alba, considered his masterpiece, was also the last, since that year, the outbreak of the Civil War, was arrested by Nationalist forces and shot ten days later under unclear allegations pointing to its role a poet, a freethinker and could alter the character ‘social order’.