Federico García Lorca (1898 - 1936) was a Spanish poet, playwright and theatre director, and the best-known member of the literary circle known as the Generation of '27. [1] His poetry fused Andalusian folk tradition with avant-garde imagery, while his rural tragedies reshaped twentieth-century Spanish theatre. He was killed by Nationalist forces at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, a death that made him an enduring symbol of artistic loss under political violence. [2]
Early life and education
García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, a village in the fertile plain west of Granada, into a prosperous landowning family. [1] The songs, ballads and speech rhythms of the Andalusian countryside surrounded him from childhood and would remain the raw material of his art. He showed early aptitude for music, studying piano and at one point intending a career as a composer.
He enrolled at the University of Granada, studying in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters as well as law. [1] In 1919 he moved to Madrid and took up residence at the Residencia de Estudiantes, the liberal student hall that served as an incubator for Spanish modernism. There he formed close friendships with the painter Salvador Dalí and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and entered the circle of poets later called the Generation of '27. [3]
Poetry
Lorca's first volume, Libro de poemas, appeared in 1921. His reputation was secured by Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads), published in 1928, which reworked the traditional Spanish ballad form into a dense, image-laden poetry of desire, fate and violence set among Andalusia's Roma communities. [2] The book's popular success unsettled him, and he resisted being read as a merely regional or folkloric writer.
A period in New York in 1929 and 1930, spent loosely attached to Columbia University, produced the harsher, surrealist-inflected poems collected posthumously as Poeta en Nueva York, in which the modern city appears as a landscape of alienation. [2] His Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, an elegy for a bullfighter friend, is widely regarded as among the finest elegies in the Spanish language.
Theatre
On returning to Spain, Lorca directed La Barraca, a travelling student theatre company that toured the countryside performing classic Spanish plays for rural audiences, an initiative supported under the Second Republic. [1] The experience sharpened his own dramatic writing.
Between 1932 and 1936 he completed the three rural tragedies on which his theatrical reputation chiefly rests: Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding), Yerma and La casa de Bernarda Alba. [3] Each sets individual passion against the rigid codes of honour, custom and religion governing Spanish village life, and each ends in death or sterility. Lorca also wrote farces, puppet plays and the experimental, long-unstaged El público.
Death and legacy
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Lorca was in Granada. He was arrested by Nationalist forces and shot in August 1936 near Víznar; his remains have never been definitively identified. [1] [2] His work was suppressed or censored in Spain for much of the Franco period.
García Lorca is now among the most translated and performed Spanish writers of any era. His plays are staples of the international repertoire, his poems have been set to music by composers and singers worldwide, and his killing remains a focus of Spanish debate over the memory of the Civil War. [4]
