Death at Daybreak

SELECTED POEMS OF FEDERICO GARCiA LORCA (56 pp.)--Translated by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili--Transatlantic Arts ($1.25).

One night in August 1936, a group of Spanish fascists went to a house in the old Moorish city of Granada and carried off the poet Lorca. What happened thereafter is still a matter of conjecture. He was never seen again. By some accounts the fascists took him to the village of Fuente-vaqueros, where he had been born 37 years before, and there at daybreak, when the first light was glittering on the tiles and window panes of Andalusia, shot him. He had written about this hour in his country--of how

On the roofs trembled

Little lanterns of tinfoil,

A thousand glass tambourines

Stabbed through the dawn . . .

A big wind left

In the mouth a faint taste

Of frost, mint and sweet basil.*

This was the death of a writer who made universal poetry of the life of Spain. A number of translators have tried to reproduce his quality in English, and though Poet Spender and his collaborator have scarcely succeeded, they have at least picked some good poems to make the effort on. Among these lyrics are several as frighteningly alive as the jet from an artery.

Lorca's Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, translated in this volume, has no equal among modern elegies for directness in the vision of death and for symphonic magnificence of form. Mejias was a torero, an Andalusian and friend of Lorca's, who died after a goring :

death laid eggs in the wound

at five in the afternoon . . .

From far off the gangrene is now coming

at five in the afternoon.

Lily trumpet around his green groins

at five in the afternoon.

His wounds were burning like suns

at five in the afternoon,

and the crowd was breaking the windows. . . .

Most of Lorca's poems were composed in the simplest Spanish verse, about basic Spanish emotions -- love, pride and the awareness of death--and were meant to be sung to the guitar. For years he disliked to have them printed. Many of them were -- and still are -- sung by people who never saw them in print and could not read them if they did.

Federico GARCiA Lorca was a versatile Spaniard, a painter, musician, actor and dramatist as well as a poet. Since his death his reputation has continued to grow. Like most reputations, it has an element of the factitious. Lorca took no part in the Spanish republican movement, far less in the revolutionary uprising of the Left. He resented the political demonstrations that were made in Barcelona in 1935 on the occasion of one of his plays. Inevitably, however, Lorca's assassination made him a hero and a martyr of the republic. Whether he knew it or not, he was an enemy of organized oppression and stupidity, and fittingly met his death at its hands.

* Translation by lisa Barea.

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