Lorca in New York

Last night I attended a poetry reading titled "Celebrating Federico García Lorca" at the New York Public Library. Federico García Lorca was an early 20th-century Spanish poet and playwright who I was obsessed with in my earlier years who was killed by fascists during the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

The event is tied to a Lorca in NYC festival going on this year, commemorating the year the poet spent studying at Columbia and immersing himself in American life. Out of it came his book POET IN NEW YORK, bearing witness to events as big as the stock market crash and as small as witnessing a family he was staying with in grief when their daughter fell down a well and drowned. Most of the readings from last night's event were from that book, as well as a few snippets from Lorca's essay "Theory and Play of the Duende" and letters he wrote describing his experiences at the time.

The library also has an exhibit titled "Back Tomorrow" of part of the original manuscript of POET IN NEW YORK, as well as ephemera like Lorca's drawings and his passport (see the photo I stealthed inside the exhibition room on Saturday when I visited). "Back Tomorrow" is so named because of a note Lorca left his editor in 1936 when he dropped off the manuscript of POET IN NEW YORK, promising he would be "back tomorrow." He never returned and was killed a few weeks later; his editor took the manuscript with him into exile and published it in Mexico.

I had never been to one of the library's "Live at the NYPL" events, mostly because they are relatively pricey ($25, $15 for students) and usually weren't such a burning interest that I was willing to pay the price. I wasn't overly familiar with any of the poets reading (including former U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine, to my shame) but was hooked by the opportunity to hear Lorca's poetry aloud; in fact the evening began with an audio recording from 1930 of Lorca accompanying a Spanish singer in New York on the piano, spooky and magic. My favorite reading came from Tracy K. Smith including her poem "Duende," based on her experiences traveling in southern Spain near where Lorca grew up. My least favorite section was a performance art piece in which an actor conveyed parts of Lorca's work, but did a lot of looming over the audience and bugging his eyes out theatrically to emphasize certain lines. If he wanted unsettling, he definitely got that! But from all accounts Lorca was very shy about performing in public and was not at all a hammy mchamville. This is why we do research, yes?

I feel lucky that I was able to catch this show before I go. The exhibit at the library runs through July 20, and even if you have little knowledge of Lorca, I highly suggest you check it out! You can also buy the new translation of POET IN NEW YORK at the NYPL store afterward if your interest is piqued.

Federico García Lorca is still dead, now also missing

Frig! It wasn't a mass grave after all: Archaeologists failed to find any human remains on the site where executed Spanish poet García Lorca was believed to be buried.

According to Spanish newspaper El País, researchers were relying on the account of a waiter who first came forth in 1956 to show an American visitor the gravesite (and who along the way somewhere picked up the nickname "The Communist"). A competing theory from the testimony of a jailer who witnessed his execution places his remains about 1400 feet away from where they've been digging now.

As one archaeologist on the project told the paper, "Basing ourselves on oral history and one informant is a mistake." No kidding.

Federico García Lorca is still dead

The BBC reports that a team of Spanish professors at the University of Granada will be allowed next week to excavate the site where poet and playwright Federico García Lorca is believed to have been buried. Working with the Association of the Recuperation of Historic Memory, which only sounds Orwellian, the team is armed with DNA samples from Lorca's surviving relatives to try and identify the remains of the writer, who was executed near his birthplace by Fascist guards in August 1936.

Often when authors die I find myself writing here, "I know how well known and respected he or she was, although I'm not familiar enough with the work to offer a proper eulogy." Lorca would be an exception to that. I was introduced to Lorca's work in high school -- his play "The House of Bernarda Alba," about five sisters stifled by their mother's rule, is standard Spanish-class stuff -- and eventually worked my way through all his work and two biographies (recommend LORCA, A DREAM OF LIFE over the Ian Gibson). Studying the facts of his life allows students to slot him tidily into a timeline of Spanish literature; he was well known as a member of the artistic movement the "Generation of '27" at the time of his death, which bridges the gap between literature before and after Franco assumed power (at which point most of his works were banned for years).

At the time I studied him Lorca had been dead for over 60 years, but I can't think of another author whose death affected me as profoundly. I was sadder about the death of a 38-year-old Spanish man, to whom I had no ties other than a stack of books and a feeling, than at my own great-grandmother's funeral. I felt a ripple of this sentiment earlier this year, as was perhaps inevitable, amid INFINITE JEST with the reminder that its author would not complete another novel, that next year we'll be toting our copies of THE PALE KING and trying to convince ourselves it's almost as good. It's not as good. It will never be as good. Like Lorca, David Foster Wallace had years of work ahead of him, work we will never see and cannot imagine. Does knowing the little we do know about the circumstances of Wallace's death make it any easier to take? Not really.

I'll be following the dig in Granada, and I hope they will find out what happened, but even giving his remains a proper burial won't erase the legacy of the army that took him to the outskirts of town. This was a regime that had so little respect for human life that it allowed thousands of its own men to die in the mountains building a monstrous tomb meant to memorialize the war dead. Spilling blood for the spilled blood. And how many of those men didn't leave a poem or a play behind to be remembered by? And how many of their names have been forgotten, snapped off family trees in a conflict that was really just the rehearsal dinner to the world's 1940s gore wedding? And how many, how many in the mass graves now?

I threw up the sponge instead of throwing down the gauntlet.

It's not every day you get to see something on Broadway that you could recite from end to end. Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit" was part of my brief, fleeting career in high school drama (fun fact: I understudied regular commenter Elizabeth) and it all came rushing back last weekend when I saw Rupert Everett, Christine Ebersole and Angela Lansbury perform in it on Broadway last weekend. If I was laughing at slightly different moments than the rest of the audience -- well, that's old age for you.

"Blithe Spirit" is a fun play, but I wouldn't put it up there with my favorites. (Not even sure where my scrawled-over copy is at this point, although I'm sure I kept it.) The small collection of plays I own are the ones I read over and over without them losing their resonance. Some sparked my interest when I first read them, like when I was assigned Lorca's "As Five Years Pass"; others, like "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," I found after seeing a particularly memorable performance. ("Cat" was my go-to book one summer to such an extent that if anyone else picked up my copy it would probably burst into flames.)

If you have a favorite play, how did you find it?