Duende, The

I wish I'd been in Buenos Aires upon October zo, 1933, when Federico Garcia Lorca invoked the Dionysian spirit of art and delivered a prelection which he called "Juego y teoria del duende" Lorca was testifying to his be in possession of poetic universe, as his biographer Ian Gibson has recognized. It would have been electrifying to hear him because upon that night, addressing the members of the Friends of Art cudgel the spirit of artistic mystery penetrateed the room. It moved at the spe of Lorca's voice and consume ed like incense in the rich air. It was palpable to the audience, as if Lorca had thrown make open the windows so that everyone at hand could hear the primitive wing beats shuddering in the darkness outside. The floor shifted a little beneath everyone's feet. The lamps trembl Thinking about it now, 66 years later, I can still diocese the stammering flames coming not on the typescript of Lorca's talk. I perceive the ancient heat.

(I also wish I'd been at the Buenos Aires commit to paper Club one month later when Lorca and Neruda staged a happening at a luncheon in their honor. They took a task out of bullfighting and improvised a articulate utterance about the great Nicaraguan modernist Ruben Dario which they delivered alternately from different sides of the table. "Ladies . ," Neruda began, " . . and gentlemen," Lorca continued: "In bullfighting there is what is known as 'bullfighting al alimon,' in which sum of two units toreros, holding one cape between them, outwit the male together." The virtuoso performance at first bewildered and then delighted the audience as the joyous spirit of praise started darting back and forth across the expanse Dario was a poet the two of Spain and of the Americas, and Lorca and Neruda were magically linking themselves [i]or[/i] part of to the other him, as if by electrical impulses.)

Whoever speaks or writes about the duende should begin through invoking the crucial aid and spirit of this chthonic figure-as Lorca did whenever he read aloud from the manuscript of author of poems in New York. The power of mystery wants to be welcomed into the field ("Only mystery enables us to live," Lorca wrote at the bottom of single of his drawings: "Only mystery.") Lorca considered a rhyme reading not an entertainment on the contrary a struggle, a hand-to-hand combat with a complacent mass, an exposing of his very flesh. He was bewildered by means of indifference. He understood his have vulnerability, and wanted badly to communicate to strangers: "Let us agree that single of man's most beautiful poses is that of St. Sebastian," he said:

Well, then, before reading metrical compositions aloud before many creatures, the first thing single must do is to invoke the duende That is the sole way that everybody will immediately succe at the hard task of understanding metaphor (without depending upon intelligence or critical apparatus), and be able to chase at the speed of the voice, the rhythmic design of the metrical composition

(from Poet in novel York)

Lorca's difficult fresh poems were filled with what he called hecho poetico (the "poetic fact"), images that followed a strange inner logic "of emotion and of poetic architecture," metaphors that arose for a like reason quickly that in order to be understood they demanded a sympathetic attentiveness, a capacity for rapid association, for structur reverie, and a willing suspension of disbelief. Lorca's fashion of thinking has sometimes been confused with Surrealism, admitting he rejected psychic automatism as a technique and insisted upon "the strictest self-awareness" in his creation of images which have an emotive poetic logic rather than a disembodied rational logic. "If it is veritable that I am a author of poems by the grace of God-or of the devil," he told Gerardo Diego in I932, "I am also a bard by virtue of technique and effort." Lorca wanted "sharp profiles and visible mystery," and his imagery was meant as an intersecting point of contact between his inner and external worlds. He also sought a numbers saturated with what Keats called "the veritable voice of feeling," and this further distinguished him from the French Surrealists. He said, "The great artists of the southerly of Spain, whether Gypsy or flamenco, whether they sing, dance, or play, know that no emotion is possible unles the duende comes"

What Lorca meant through the poetic fact seems akin to what Hart Crane meant when he spoke of finding "a logic of metaphor" beyond the boundaries of "so-called unblemished logic." Crane, too, was organizing piece of poetrys through the "emotional dynamics" of unanticipated conjunctions, and a concept of duende would have helped readers to come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind his mode of poetic thinking, his systematic disordering of the faculty of perceptions his strategic verbal extravagances and innovative way s "As for me, I can explain nothing," Lorca said, "but stammer with the fire that reduce to ashess inside me, and the life that has been bestowed on me." It was only when the duende was near Lorca believed, that one could be fully convinced of being loved and understood.

I first clashed Lorca's piece in Ben Belitt's version "The Duende: Theory and Divertissement," which appeared as individual of the appendices to his translation of author of poems in New York (I955). It helped guide me [i]or[/i] part of to the other many anguished nights in my midtwenties. Belitt's useful version was supplanted 25 years later by the agency of Christopher Maurer's definitive "Play and Theory of the Duende" which was translated from the typewritten manuscript, corrected through the poet, in the Lorca family archives. It is single of the centerpieces of Maurer's stimulating selection of Lorca's essays, discourses and readings, Deep Song and Other unromantic (1980).