Poet in New York Read online

  POET IN NEW YORK

  POET IN NEW YORK

  (Poeta en Nueva York)

  Federico García Lorca

  Translated by

  Pablo Medina and Mark Statman

  Copyright © 1986 by Federico García Lorca

  Translation copyright © 2008 by Pablo Medina and Mark Statman

  Foreword copyright © 2008 by Edward Hirsch

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  A Note on the Text The Spanish text included here (on which this translation is based) is the one that appears in Obras Completas, Federico García Lorca, Tomo I, edited with notes by Arturo Del Hoyo (Madrid: Aguilar, 1986).

  Versions of some of these translations appeared in: Tin House, Subtropics, The Florida

  Review, Teachers & Writers, and The American Poetry Review (APR).

  Printed in the United States of America

  Printed simultaneously in Canada

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4865-1

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  A la Nena (P.M.)

  For Katherine and Jesse (M.S.)

  Contents

  Foreword by Edward Hirsch

  Introduction

  I. POEMAS DE LA SOLEDAD EN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

  I. POEMS OF SOLITUDE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

  Vuelta de paseo

  Back from a Walk

  1910 (Intermedio)

  1910 (Interlude)

  Fábula y rueda de los tres amigos

  Fable and Round of the Three Friends

  Tu infancia en Menton

  Your Infancy in Menton

  II. LOS NEGROS

  II. THE BLACKS

  Norma y paraíso de los negros

  Norm and Paradise of the Blacks

  El rey de Harlem

  The King of Harlem

  Iglesia abandonada (Balada de la Gran Guerra)

  Abandoned Church (Ballad of the Great War)

  III. CALLES Y SUEÑOS

  III. STREETS AND DREAMS

  Danza de la muerte

  Dance of Death

  Paisaje de la multitud que vomita (Anochecer de Coney Island)

  Landscape of the Vomiting Crowd (Twilight at Coney Island)

  Paisaje de la multitud que orina (Nocturno de Battery Place)

  Landscape of the Urinating Crowd (Nocturne of Battery Place)

  Asesinato (Dos voces de madrugada en Riverside Drive)

  Murder (Two Voices at Dawn on Riverside Drive)

  Navidad en el Hudson

  Christmas on the Hudson

  Ciudad sin sueño (Nocturno del Brooklyn Bridge)

  City Without Sleep (Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge)

  Panorama ciego de Nueva York

  Blind Panorama of New York

  Nacimiento de Cristo

  Birth of Christ

  La aurora

  Dawn

  IV. POEMAS DEL LAGO EDEN MILLS

  IV. POEMS OF LAKE EDEN MILLS

  Poema doble del lago Eden

  Double Poem of Lake Eden

  Cielo vivo

  Living Sky

  V. EN LA CABAÑA DEL FARMER (Campo de Newburg)

  V. IN THE FARMER’S CABIN (Newburgh Countryside)

  El niño Stanton

  The Boy Stanton

  Vaca

  Cow

  Niña ahogada en el pozo (Granada y Newburg)

  Girl Drowned in the Well (Granada and Newburgh)

  VI. INTRODUCCIÓN A LA MUERTE

  Poemas de la soledad en Vermont

  VI. INTRODUCTION TO DEATH

  Poems of Solitude in Vermont

  Muerte

  Death

  Nocturno del hueco

  Nocturne of the Hole

  Paisaje con dos tumbas y un perro asirio

  Landscape with Two Tombs and an Assyrian Dog

  Ruina

  Ruin

  Luna y panorama de los insectos (Poema de amor)

  Moon and Panorama of the Insects (Love Poem)

  VII. VUELTA A LA CIUDAD

  VII. RETURN TO THE CITY

  New York (Oficina y Denuncia)

  New York (Office and Denunciation)

  Cementerio judío

  Jewish Cemetery

  Pequeño poema infinito

  Small Infinite Poem

  Crucifixión

  Crucifixion

  VIII. DOS ODAS

  VIII. TWO ODES

  Grito hacia Roma (desde la torre del Chrysler Building)

  Cry Toward Rome

  (From the Tower of the Chrysler Building)

  Oda a Walt Whitman

  Ode to Walt Whitman

  IX. HUIDA DE NUEVA YORK

  Dos valses hacia la civilización

  IX. FLIGHT FROM NEW YORK

  Two Waltzes Toward Civilization

  Pequeño vals vienés

  Small Viennese Waltz

  Vals en las ramas

  Waltz in the Branches

  X. EL POETA LLEGA A LA HABANA

  X. THE POET ARRIVES IN HAVANA

  Son de negros en Cuba

  Son of Blacks in Cuba

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on the Poems

  Futher Reading

  Foreword

  Federico García Lorca spent a critical nine months in New York (June 1929–March 1930), and created from the experience an indelible work of art, an agonized spiritual tribute to the urban milieu, a ferocious testament. Lorca was extremely energized and deeply appalled by the city he discovered—its “extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm,” its “geometry and anguish”—and the work he left behind still carries a sense of shock and surprise, a weird feeling of recognition, after all this time.

  Pablo Medina and Mark Statman have given us a marvelous new version of Lorca’s anguished masterpiece, Poet in New York. The destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the wake of September 11, 2001, sent them back to the great poetry of New York City, especially Lorca’s fiery symphonic cycle, which was mostly created in the midst of the Great Depression. Lorca spoke of “a poet in New York,” but he recognized that he might just as well have said “New York in a poet.” So, too, we might say that New York has lived inside these translators, two poets who have recast his work in the light of a traumatized American city. Lorca had at different times considered calling his book The City (La Ciudad) and Introduction to Death (Introducción a la muerte) and, indeed, death and the city are its twin inspiring presences, which is one of the reasons that Medina and Statman find it so disturbingly relevant. Their translation is a major reclamation. They have given us a Poet in New York for our time.

  Lorca always recalled his stay in New York as “one of the most useful experiences” of his life. It was his first trip abroad. He called New York “Senegal with machines” and said that all of his native Granada could fit into three skyscrapers. He felt “murdered by the sky.” He was stunned by the vastness and scale of the city, which was for him a place where during the day people were mired in mindless games, fruitless labors, and at dusk poured into the streets in a
human flood. Lorca’s tenderness was affronted by the unforgiving angles and buildings. He was disoriented and carried off by the terrible rootlessness of the crowds, and he spoke of his unimaginable sadness, of being an “armless poet, lost/in the vomiting crowd.” Lorca’s vision of the crowd was influenced both by Walt Whitman who, he said, “searched it for solitudes” and by T. S. Eliot who squeezed everything out of it “like a lemon.” Poet in New York is part “Song of Myself,” part “The Waste Land.”

  The poet in Lorca’s urban cycle is an intense flâneur—enraptured, enraged—who wanders all over New York City. Lorca’s favorite neighborhood was Harlem, where he heard African American spirituals and jazz tunes that reminded him of Spanish folk music, especially his beloved canto jondo (“deep song”), traditional flamenco. His wanderings took him from the Upper West Side, where he lived in a series of residence halls at Columbia University, to Coney Island (“Landscape of the Vomiting Crowd”); he found his way from Riverside Drive to Battery Place (“Landscape of the Urinating Crowd”) and over the Brooklyn Bridge (“City Without Sleep”). He was on Wall Street on the day of the stock market crash and afterward claimed to have seen six people commit suicide during Black Tuesday. There he felt, to an unprecedented degree, “the sensation of real death, death without hope.” Lorca was staggered by the suffering around him, the greed, the anthropocentrism of urban life, and he responded with a series of phantasmagoric images, such as the opening of his “Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge”:

  No one sleeps in the sky. No one.

  No one sleeps.

  The creatures of the moon smell and circle their cabins.

  Live iguanas will come to bite the men who don’t dream

  and he who flees with broken heart will find on the corners

  the still, incredible crocodile under the tender protest of the stars.

  “I have come from the countryside,” Lorca said, “and do not believe that man is the most important thing of all.” He was dumbfounded by the daily slaughter of animals, which he described as “a river of tender blood.” He captured his disgust in “New York (Office and Denunciation),” where he wrote: “Every day in New York, they slaughter/four million ducks,/five million pigs,/two thousand doves for the pleasure of the dying,/a million cows,/a million lambs,/and two million roosters/that leave the sky in splinters.” He denounces “the endless trains of milk,/the endless trains of blood,” and becomes a bitter prophet who works himself into a frenzy of condemnation and offers himself up as a sacrifice:

  No, no. I denounce.

  I denounce the conspiracy of those deserted offices

  swept clean of agony,

  that erase the designs of the forest,

  and I offer myself to be eaten by the crushed cows

  when their screams fill the valley

  where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.

  “Being born in Granada,” Lorca once said, “has given me a sympathetic understanding of all those who are persecuted—the Gypsy, the black, the Jew, the Moor, which all Grandians have inside them.” He identified with those on the edges, the periphery. Lorca was thunderstruck by the racism he found in the New World (“Oh Harlem! Harlem!/There is no anguish compared to your oppressed reds”), and the theme of racial injustice, of social inequity, runs like a current through Poet in New York. He wanted to write, as he put it, “the poem of the black race in North America,” and he struggled to understand, as he later told an interviewer, “a world shameless and cruel enough to divide people by color when in fact color is the sign of God’s artistic genius.”

  The city Lorca discovered on his many solitary walks becomes in his book a prototype of the twentieth-century urban world. Lorca’s diagnosis still holds as he inveighs against our hostility to nature, “the painful slavery of both men and machines,” the agonizing social injustice, and the indifference to suffering that seems to permeate the very atmosphere. Yet there is also a great exuberance underlying Lorca’s nocturnes and morning songs, his furious rambles that took him all over New York City. The testament he left behind is a fierce indictment of the modern world incarnated in city life, but it is also a wildly imaginative and joyously alienated declaration of residence.

  —Edward Hirsch

  Introduction

  Already a well-known poet and dramatist in his native Spain, Federico García Lorca arrived in New York in August 1929, at age thirty-one, in time to witness the collapse of the stock market that sent the city into a tailspin and much of the world into the Great Depression. That October he experienced firsthand the despair of people who had lost everything. He saw the suicides splayed on the sidewalks. He sensed a city on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. Depressed and grieving over the results of a broken love affair, Lorca had been eager to reach the city and throw himself into its streets. He had read accounts of the grandeur, bustle, and diversity of the great metropolis and seen its images projected on movie screens. What he found had little to do with what he had read or seen. New York was larger and more consuming than any other city he knew. It was abrasive, dirty, caustic, cold, shadowy, and dangerous; in short, it was an analog of hell as terrifying as any depicted in literature or art to that time. All of what he experienced on the streets of the city, however, paled before the horror he felt on Wall Street, where, he wrote in an essay, “rivers of gold arrived from all parts of the earth, and with it death. Nowhere else on earth but there can one feel the total absence of the spirit.” Coming to rid himself of grief, he encounters an abundance of grief; coming to witness the power of human endeavor, he finds inhumanity, tragedy, failure.

  Seventy years later, those of us who had seen the twin towers of the World Trade Center rise over the cityscape and accepted them, reluctantly, as symbols of New York’s vigor and permanence found it difficult to witness how easily they came down, how the raw materials of our daily lives—glass, steel, concrete, and human flesh—could, in the space of two hours, turn to rubble: “Murdered by the sky./Among the forms that move toward the snake/and the forms searching for crystal.…” Their weakness was our weakness, their impermanence our impermanence. For weeks after the disaster, smoke and dust filled the air, and the prevailing winds carried them uptown to the Bronx, east toward Brooklyn and Queens, west toward New Jersey. That smoke had the strangest smell of wrecked buildings and decaying bodies, which we tried to avoid by closing our windows, by wearing ineffective felt masks, or by holding handkerchiefs to our faces. New York had received a deep wound and we felt those airplanes reach inside us, crash, and burn through our sun-filled morning again and again:

  The light is buried by noises and chains

  in the obscene challenge of rootless science.

  In the neighborhoods are people who wander unsleeping

  like survivors of a shipwreck of blood.

  Seeking solace we read the literature of New York: the poetry of Whitman, the chronicles of José Martí, Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” E. B. White’s extraordinary essay, “Here Is New York,” the myriad novels and plays the city has inspired; and we dove into Ginsberg, Corso, Koch, O’Hara—in short, into the body of work that informs and defines the spiritual fabric of our city. Then we came to García Lorca’s Poet in New York and saw reflected in this book the range of emotions we ourselves felt and images strangely reminiscent of the ones we witnessed on September 11 and its aftermath.

  One afternoon a couple of years later, we realized a new translation of Poet in New York was needed that showed the city, not just as it was then but as it became after September 11, riven by tragedy, burdened by rage, humbled by grief. Who would be better suited to the job than two New York poets, neither of whom was a professional translator or scholar but who were for decades (still are) devoted readers of Lorca?

  While Lorca could have admitted defeat and returned home soon after his arrival in 1929, instead he confronted the city and in so doing he faced the sources of his grief and the repositories of his fears, a New York transformed into Lorca, a Lorca trans
formed into New York. As he himself wrote, “I have said a poet in New York, and I should have said, ‘New York in a poet.’” Stripped bare, made vulnerable before this new world, Lorca kept his anguish from his family and in frequent letters home he chronicled a time filled with friends and parties, visits and discoveries. But his struggles with New York were real. Through poetry he discovered a way to contain and shape the experience, offering not so much a shield for protection as a way into himself and a conduit through the heartless modern megalopolis. Lorca’s journey not only led to some of his finest writing, it also provided him with ways to address personal and social issues that would continue the rest of his short life. He became much less ambivalent about his homosexuality, more accepting of his conflicted but nevertheless deeply held religious faith, and deeply critical of the destructive capacity of unchecked industry and capitalism. Like a performer of cante jondo, or deep song, an especially emotive form of flamenco, he ended up struggling with duende, that mysterious force that underlies all great art, his own particular duende as well as that of the city. As Lorca wrote in “Play and Theory of the Duende,” duende leads neither to victory nor defeat; it is not a protective cloak or a fiery sword. And it certainly is not diversion. It doesn’t keep “the lobsters of arsenic” from falling on your head. Duende wounds and with the wounding comes creation, the poem “baptizing with dark waters all who behold it.”

  When Lorca left New York for Cuba in 1930 he was not fleeing duende. It had come and gone, perhaps never to return again. In Cuba he found forms of music and dance—we should say forms of living—that were parallel to those he found among the North American blacks in the Harlem he so admired: “Blacks … are among the most spiritual and delicate [beings] of that world. Because they believe, because they hope, because they sing, and because they have a truly religious lassitude.…” And in those Cuban roots he encountered echoes and convergences of flamenco, of Hispanic notes embedded among African rhythms. As he approached Cuba he asked, “What is this? Once again Spain? Once again the global Andalusia?” In Cuba he discovered the Spanish duende and the African duende joined at the hip. Through his experiences in New York, through duende, he had discovered himself, wounded and wiser, a fuller man and a greater poet.