BOOKS
69
they make for the cape and drive straight on ahead when you step aside,
whereas cows make for you with open eyes and chase until they gore you.
I believe that Susan had the best of the encounter with Mr. Tyndall. Let
us send flowers to the matador with the hope for a speedy recovery and
better luck at the next
corrida.
ELISEO VIVAS
EPITAPH FOR LORCA
BLOOD WEDDING. Trans. by Gilbert Ne:iman. New Directions.
$.50.
POEMS. Trans. by Stephen Spender and
/.
L. Gili. Selection and Intro·
duction
by
R. M.
Nadal. Oxford.
$2.
During the past two years there have been a number of tributes writ–
ten to the memory of Federico Garcia Lorca. I believe the last, the final
tribute is yet unwritten. There will be more to come, further evaluations
of his work, further translations of his poems and perhaps the discovery
of unpublished manuscript. From his death alone, as from a hidden grave
where gold lies buried and where the smell of blood and distant sight of
murder rise, there will be further controversies, assertions and denials and
contradictions of so·called authenticated facts, and from the fragments of
a story that makes a singular appeal to the romantic imagination, we shall
witness the creation of a contemporary legend.
Even now, even at our short perspective of three years beyond his
death, some serious attempt should be made to see two aspects of Lorca's
reputation: one is the blood-stained Lorca myth itself, the figure of a poet
killed while his country fought at civil war; the other is the scarcely less
romantic imagery of the poetry that bears his name; and both creations
are of memorable relevance to our world, now overshadowed by the threat
of sudden death .and recurrent war. Since Lorca's legend has been given
greater prominence in America than a familiar knowledge of his poems, I
shall allow it to speak first. -
Late in the year of 1936 news of the Spanish civil war brought with
it news of an irreplacable loss to European letters, the loss of a distin·
guished poet. In liberal weeklies his name was linked with the righteous–
ness of aiding the Loyalist cause. The association of the poet and the cause
then seemed fortuitous: his now famous
Llanto por Ignacio Sanches
Mejias,
translated as "Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter" entered the
same picture that already contained the figure of Mr. Ernest Hemingway
as
well as the title of a book called "Death in the Afternoon." With no less
violence and with greater verbal confusion, since the poem was written in
a foreign language, the legend bore something of the same character that
was attached to Rupert Brooke's name in 1915. Here again the reader was
confronted with the portrait of the poet as a martyr, the human sacrifice to
