Ghost of Quixote

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA: The Poetry of Limits by Dasvid K. Loughran '61 Tamesis Books Ltd., 1978. 219 pp. £14.50

Ringed by machine guns and the patentleather hats of the Guardia Civil, a group of Spanish intellectuals stood in homage for the first time to a beloved and murdered poet, some 40 years after his death. The homage to Federico Garcia Lorca organized in June 1977, was a bold gesture even in post-Franco Spain, and particularly in Granada, where any airing of the subject of Lorca's brutal murder during the Civil War had long been Prohibido

More than anything, the homage bore witness to the relevance of Lorca to the spirit of modern Spain and thus became a symbolic event. Lorca's major literary theme, in fact, is man's noble quest for a freedom never defined but evoked in a thousand splendid images and in the tragic confrontation with limitations both from within and without. Because of Lorca's deep roots in the soil of southern Spain and in a poetic tradition over nine centuries old (the "romance" or ballad form of many of his poems is related Generically to the Spanish epic of the reconquest) the sense of context is very strong in his poetry and is in itself a significant area of investigation.

David Loughran has contributed a sense of context in a deeper vein than that of nation and tradition. He seems to be with the poet as we accompany Lorca's evolution from Libro de poemas (1921) through Romancero gitano (1927) and Poeta en Nueva York, written after a trip to the United States in 1929. Loughran writes not as a detached critic but from the privileged perspective of one who obviously shares the poet's love of life and has had the patience to decipher the poetic language and the metaphysical code of the writer.

Loughran introduces his study with a poem from Lorca's earliest book, Libro de poemas. The poem "Veleta" ("Weathervane"), which contains many of Lorca's major natural images, situates the poet at the center of a universe where he is a weathervane visited by the "wind of the South . . . dark-skinned and warm" and the "wind of the north" with its "cape of spectral captains." The winds call the poet to adventure, but, a captive in chains, he is unable to follow because, in Loughran's words, he is "alienated from the unconscious and natural rhythm of the universe.".

One of Loughran's major achievements is In describing that very intimate and tragic identity with the land of southern Spain which in a sense is both the goal and the limitation-read destiny-of the poet. Loughran's description of Granada and Seville as poetic scenarios and inner landscape creates a geopoetic climate that allows the reader to travel into the verse along some of the same winding paths as the poet. Lorca himself said of Romancero gitano (GypsyBallads) that their "sole, essential personage is Granada." A Granada which, in Lorca's words, "is growing dimmer instant by instant and in the streets that lead out to the countryside there is an infinite desolation and the feeling of an abandoned port."

Another, and perhaps the most important of Loughran's contributions lies in the direction of the approximation to the poetic "I." Though Lorca has long been esteemed for his plastic realizations and his evocation of the" Spanish Weltanschauung in drama, the relationship between the poet and his persona has been habitually neglected. Following Lorca's persona from the early adolescent who finds the key to the universe in the small world populated with bourgeois snails and heroic ants, through the Don Pedro of Gypsy Ballads who rides out in search of "bread and kisses," Loughran finally finds in the sailor persona of Songs and Poet in New York the figure of a constant quester.

One must also mention Loughran's excellent poem translations and his chapter devoted to the correlation between Lorca's abstract drawings (reproduced in the text) and poetic symbol. The book admirably accomplished its goal: "to bring Lorca to as wide an audience as possible."

Frank Janney who taught at Dartmouth fornine years, is president of Ediciones del Norte,a publishing house devoted to Spanish books,recently established in Hanover.