Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch

Apocryphal Lorca

Apocryphal Lorca Translation, Parody, Kitsch

Jonathan Mayhew

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

is professor of Spanish at the University of Kansas. He is the author of three books, most recently of The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry, 1980–2000 (2009).

Jonathan Mayhew

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2009 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51203-7 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-51203-7 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mayhew, Jonathan, 1960–   Apocryphal Lorca : translation, parody, kitsch / Jonathan Mayhew.    p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51203-7 (cloth : alk. paper)   ISBN-10: 0-226-51203-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. García Lorca, Federico, 1898–1936—Influence. 3. García Lorca, Federico, 1898–1936—Translations into English. 4. García Lorca, Federico, 1898–1936—Parodies, imitations, etc. 5. García Lorca, Federico, 1898–1936—Adaptations. 6. García Lorca, Federico, 1898–1936—Appreciation— United States. 7. American poetry—Spanish influences. I. Title.   PS159.S7M39 2009   868'.6209—dc22 2008036494 a The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Infor­ mation Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

for Akiko and Julia

When the translation and the original meet The doubtful original and the strong mistranslation The original feels like a triple pun And the translation cries, Without me you are lost. David Shapiro, “After a Lost Original”

Contents



Preface  xi



Acknowledgments  xvii

1

Federico García Lorca (Himself  )  1

2

The American Agenda  22

3

Poet-Translators: Langston Hughes to Paul Blackburn  53

4

The Deep Image  78

5

Apocryphal Lorca: Robert Creeley and Jack Spicer  102

6

Frank O’Hara’s “Lorcaescas”  122

7

Kenneth Koch: Parody and Pedagogy  143

8

Jerome Rothenberg: The Lorca Variations  160



Conclusion: An American Lorca?  175



Notes  183



Bibliography  205



Index  215

Preface

This is not a book about the Spanish playwright and poet Federico García Lorca (1898–1936). I do not wish to add an additional monograph to the vast and erratic bibliography on his life and work. It is, rather, an exploration of the apocryphal afterlife of García Lorca in the poetic culture of the United States. Twentieth-century American poets, in large numbers, have translated his poems and written imitations, parodies, and pastiches—along with essays and reviews. With the possible exception of Rainer Maria Rilke, Lorca is the twentieth-century European poet with the strongest presence in the English language.1 A list of prominent English-language poets, the majority of them from the United States, who have translated Lorca or invoked the Lorquian duende at some point in their writing lives would have to include the following names: Conrad Aiken, Amiri Baraka, Ben Belitt, Paul Blackburn, Robert Bly, Roy Campbell, Leonard Cohen, Robert Creeley, Victor Hernández Cruz, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Donald Hall, Edward Hirsch, Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes, Steven Jonas, Donald Justice, Bob Kaufman, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, Frank Lima, Nathaniel Mackey, W. S. Merwin, Hilda Morley, Michael McClure, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Rexroth, Barbara Jane Reyes, Jerome Rothenberg, David Shapiro, William Jay Smith, Stephen Spender, Jack Spicer, William Carlos Williams, William Stafford, Diane Wakoski, and James Wright.2 xi

While not all of these poets have been equally devoted to Lorca, the sheer length and variety of this list indicate several possible avenues of approach to the study of Lorca and English-language poetry. We could use a monograph with the title Lorca and African American Poetry, addressing his impact on poets like Hughes, Kaufman, Baraka, Mackey, and another on his importance for gay male poets (Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg, O’Hara . . .). A critical look at the history of the translation of Lorca into English would be a worthy project, as would a study of Lorca’s influence on the poetics of the deep image. The book I have written does, in fact, address these issues, some in more depth than others. Nevertheless, I have not been able to address every single instance of English-language Lorquismo. I have been guided by my own tastes and interests and by a desire to develop a thesis. My overarching idea is that Lorca in English translation and adaptation has become a specifically American poet, adaptable to the cultural and ideological desiderata of U.S. poets during the cold war period. 3 I will argue, further, that the American Lorca is largely an apocryphal figure, an invention of poets in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. Lorca is unique in the extent to which he, or at least some image of him, has been fully assimilated into the American idiom. Other foreign-language poets have been influential in the United States, but none has been so thoroughly Americanized. One model for my critical project is the work of Marjorie Perloff, who has organized several books on twentieth-century poetry and poetics around a pivotal figure: Arthur Rimbaud in The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Ezra Pound in The Dance of the Intellect, and Ludwig Wittgenstein in Wittgenstein’s Ladder. The central figure in each one of these books is used as a fulcrum to address writers from a very specific critical perspective and to offer new interpretations of literary history. This model not a rigid one: it plays out differently in these three Perloff books, and differently yet again in my own project. My Lorca, like Perloff ’s Rimbaud, is a tutelary duende, a patron for a particular tradition (or set of traditions) within contemporary American poetics. Nevertheless, I cannot see American Lorquismo as a faithful translation xii 

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of a genuine original. The object of my study has been elusive: I have looked for Lorca in the usual places and not found him there, yet I have sometimes found more substantial evidence of his presence in unexpected places. I have been especially interested in delineating the “negative space” of Lorca’s influence, as in a drawing that suggests the shape of two objects by depicting the empty space between them. What Lorca is not, in the American context, is just as significant as the positive values he represents. The genre I have termed “apocryphal translation” is key to my exploration of this negative space. Robert Creeley’s “After Lorca” and several poems from Jack Spicer’s book of the same title are translations of texts that do not exist in the original Spanish. As with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets From the Portuguese, there are no original texts standing behind these translations. Unlike Browning’s poems, however, these texts sometimes create the strong illusion of an original text, or in other cases an uncertainty as to whether any original exists. Expanding the definition of “apocryphal translation” to include other varieties of Lorquiana in U.S. poetry, I have considered further examples: Frank O’Hara’s “Lorcaescas,” a nonextant work mentioned in another O’Hara poem; Kenneth Koch’s hoax (or parody) “Some South American Poets,” based, in my surmise, on an amalgam of Lorca and José Luis Borges; and Jerome Rothenberg’s The Lorca Variations, a book-length set of variations based on Rothenberg’s previous translation of Lorca’s Suites. Rearranging the letters of the word APOCRYPHAL, an acquaintance of mine, Herb Levy, found a perfect anagram: HAPPY LORCA. Taking this anagram as a propitious sign, I have concluded that the ways in which U.S. poets have reinvented Lorca, while problematic in many respects, are felicitous, generative of new poetic possibilities. The standard practice of translation, which aims for a satisfactory compromise between fidelity to the source text and acceptability by the target audience, remains necessary. Apocryphal translation, however, contains a higher concentration of information about the negotiation of cultural differences. The less faithful the translation is, the more information Preface 

xiii

of this type will become available. When the original text does not exist at all, then, we get a pure vision of how one culture might imagine another. Since my focus is on the translation of works that Lorca did not write, my examination of his literary career will be necessarily brief. In chapter 1, “Federico García Lorca (Himself ),” I will sketch the portrait of a charismatic, protean, and enigmatic authorial figure. The pur­ pose of this chapter is to establish an implicit point of comparison with the Americanized Lorca that dominates the rest of the book. My Lorca has a greater intellectual capacity and a more highly developed literary culture than the mythic stereotype allows for. Distorted views of Lorca go wrong, usually, by virtue of being incomplete, of failing to account for the multifaceted nature of his achievement. No study of Lorca’s poetry on its own terms can explain why his poetry resonated so strongly in the United States. For an explanation of this resonance, I turn in a second chapter to a set of purely domestic criteria that have little to do with Lorca as he might appear within his own cultural context. Lorca was particularly attractive to poets seeking to define a new variety of American cultural nationalism. He arrived on the scene as an alien figure, strongly identified with a quite different brand of national exceptionalism—that of Spain itself. Far from being an obstacle, however, Lorca’s foreignness proved useful to those in search of a form of American cultural nationalism that might stand opposed to cold war politics. Lorca’s poetry came to the fore with the poets associated with The New American Poetry, an anthology published in 1960. The contributions of African American and gay male poets are especially noteworthy during this period, but there is also a more generic Lorquismo, characterized by a tone of naive enthusiasm and by a proliferation of abusive citations of the duende. Poet-translators have played a key role in the creation of the American Lorca. In chapter 3, I will examine the strategies of domestication seen in a few paradigmatic cases, from Langston Hughes through Paul Blackburn. The sheer number of translations of Lorca is such that I have been forced to be selective, since an exhaustive survey would have xiv 

Preface

been impractical. Chapter 4 will address the phenomenon of “deep image” poetry, a movement in midcentury U.S. poetics that reportedly owes a portion of its initial impetus to Lorca. I will conclude that the debt of deep image poetry to Lorca is less substantial than many critics have assumed. The founders of this movement drew inspiration from many sources aside from the “Spanish surrealism,” while Lorca himself has a minor role in the later development of this style. In chapters 5 through 8, I will examine the Lorquian writings of Creeley, Spicer, O’Hara, Koch, and Rothenberg. The choice of these particular poets, and not others, requires some explanation. Spicer’s After Lorca and Rothenberg’s The Lorca Variations are obvious choices, since they are book-length homages to the Spanish poet by major figures. Creeley’s short poem “After Lorca” is too perfect an example of apocryphal translation to omit. The chapters on O’Hara and Koch, on the other hand, show the connection between Lorca and American poets who are not usually associated with Spanish poetry: by looking at the Spanish side of poets usually associated more with French poetry, I attempt to take measure of the extent of his penetration into American poetry. At many points during the writing of this book I have found myself torn between two contradictory perspectives. Long an admirer of Creeley, Spicer, Koch, O’Hara, and Rothenberg, I want to celebrate the inventiveness of their apocryphal Lorcas. As a Hispanist professionally dedicated to Spanish culture, on the other hand, I have resisted the entire notion of creating an “American Lorca” with so little of the complexity of Lorca as I view him. I have also felt some resentment of the virtual monopoly of Lorca in the reception of Spanish poetry in the United States: while a few other poets have emerged from Lorca’s shadow, his dominance is still unquestionable. Lorca’s poetry establishes the very terms by which other Spanish poets are read in the English-speaking world. It would be easier to find a publisher for the sixth or seventh translation of Gypsy Ballads than for the first translation of a major poet of the last half of the century like Claudio Rodríguez. Preface 

xv

I could not have written this book without being provoked by the problematic nature of American transformations of Lorca, who remains a fascinating but unfathomable writer—multifaceted, Protean, open to multiple and conflicting poetic performances. My hope is that the book will be provocative in its turn, stimulating other critics to examine the thorny problems posed by the vicissitudes of crosscultural understanding.

xvi 

Preface

Acknowledgments

A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed me a year’s leave in which to complete the manuscript. Kathy Porsch of the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas offered expert assistance in preparing the fellowship application. I would also like to acknowledge the Fundación Federico García Lorca in Madrid, where I did research in the Summer of 2006, and its courteous and helpful librarians. Many others helped to make this book possible. My parents, Leon and Janet Mayhew, had books by Lorca in the house where I grew up. My first professors of Lorca were José Luis Cano and Reed Anderson. The incomparable comparatist Howard Young offered his expert advice on an embryonic version of this project written many years ago. I would also like to single out Vicky Unruh, my supportive department chair, along with my past and present colleagues in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas; the participants in the Poetics Seminar at the Hall Center for the Humanities, especially Jill Kuhnheim, Cyrus Console, Ken Irby, Joe Harrington, and Judith Roitman; Akiko Tsuchiya and Julia TsuchiyaMayhew; and the readers of my blog Bemsha Swing, too numerous to name individually. Several other poets and scholars offered their advice and encouragement: Enrique Álvarez, Bob Antonio, Silvia Bermúdez, Jordan Davis, xvii

Ben Friedlander, Roberta Johnson, Herb Levy, Juan Carlos Mestre, David Shapiro, Mark Statman, and four readers for the University of Chicago Press (Andrew A. Anderson, Mary Ann Caws, Stephen Fredman, and Christopher Maurer). Others who inspired my work include Marjorie Perloff, Luis Fernández Cifuentes, John Wilcox, and the late John Kronik. All errors of fact and judgment, of course, are my own responsibility. Randolph Petilos, my editor at the University of Chicago Press, offered his early enthusiasm and continued support for this project, helping in many ways large and small.

xviii 

Acknowledgments

1 Federico Garcêa Lorca (Himself) En mis conferencias he hablado a veces de la Poesía, pero de lo único que no puedo hablar es de mi poesía. Y no porque sea un inconsciente de lo que hago. Al contrario, si es verdad que soy poeta por la gracia de Dios—o del demonio—, también lo es que lo soy por la gracia de la técnica y del esfuerzo, y de darme cuenta en absoluto de lo que es un poema.1 [In my lectures I have spoken at times about Poetry, but the only thing I cannot talk about is my poetry. And not because I am unconscious of what I am doing. On the contrary, if it is true that I am a poet by the grace of God—or the devil—it is also true that I am a poet by the grace of technique and effort, and by having an absolute awareness of what a poem is.]

Who, or what, is Lorca? The idea that certain distortions and oversimplifications run through his American reception only makes sense in contrast to some presumably more accurate and complete view. Yet there is no way of restoring the author’s work to what it was before being subjected to the distorting lens of interpretation. My own biases will come into play in the contention that Lorca is an intellectual, selfaware artist: I resist the uncritical, hagiographical treatment to which he has often been subjected, and am skeptical of approaches that rely too heavily on the romantic ideas of the “genius” or the Lorquian version of that idea: the duende. My own construction of this authorial figure is exactly that: a construction that I have developed as a prelude to the argument of this book. The opposition between my own ideas and the apocryphal Lorca of U.S. poetry does not, however, imply that I think I know who or 

what Lorca really is. In fact, my view of the Spanish poet is grounded in a profound sense of bewilderment rather than on any dogmatic cer­ tainty. I have been struggling with Lorca’s work, on and off, for almost thirty years, without arriving at many firm conclusions. My bedrock sense of Lorca is as a poet whose poetic thought is embodied directly in the poems themselves. His material is the concrete reality of words, images, and rhythms, and he has relatively clearheaded ideas about what he was doing with this material, possessing a pragmatic intelligence rather than an abstract or theoretical mind. Aesthetics, as I define it, is the perceptual in its relation to human “structures of feeling.” Lorca is a “professor of the five bodily senses,” to use his own apt formulation, endowed with an acute eye and ear and an unequalled emotional responsiveness.2 The rest of this chapter will be devoted to describing what Lorca is not; I could develop my own positive view at greater length, of course, but many aspects of Lorca’s work do not come into play at all in the American response and are thus largely irrelevant to my project. Incomplete or misleading views of Lorca have their roots in romantic ideas of poetic genius, and in stereotypes of Andalusian culture left over from European constructions of romantic Spain, often filtered through the popular writings of Ernest Hemingway. The duende is a powerful concept because it embodies simultaneously the romantic sublime and the Andalusian image-repertoire. The view of Lorca held by many American readers, in fact, is based primarily on the essay “Play and Theory of the Duende” along with some loose and usually unexamined ideas about flamenco, bullfighting, and “Spanish surrealism.” The caricature of an Andalusian Lorca, a poet both defined and limited by a regional identity, has a long history both in Spain and in the United States. Even some Hispanists continue to perpetuate this caricature, whether by commission or omission. The problem is not the quite understandable identification of Lorca with Andalusia, Granada, or the Gypsies, but the ideological consequences that flow from this identification. Lorca has traditionally been seen as the poet of the gypsies, the childlike embodiment of Andalu 

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sian gracia, or else as a poet of the romantic sublime. These are Lorcas of straw that are quite easy to knock down. Or so one might think. What is harder is to do without such ideas. The critical construction of a non-Andalusian Lorca would be a serious distortion, since it would ignore the way in which the poet drew upon a particular image repertoire, even while consciously distancing himself from its more stereotypical expressions. It should be pointed out, moreover, that the Andalusian cultural tradition to which Lorca is heir is complex and multifaceted in its own right, including not only the romantic stereotype of the gypsy, but also baroque influences (Góngora, Soto de Rojas), the Moorish and Jewish heritage of the pre-1492 period, and a certain elegant urbanity characteristic of the late nineteenth-century period. Lorca’s literary Andalusia is itself a hybrid construction, not a one-dimensional caricature.3 Would it even be desirable to construct a Lorca free from romantic ideology, a Lorca without duende? At one point in the development of this project I explained it to myself, and to anyone else who would listen, as an escape from the duende, in direct opposition to the seemingly insatiable American appetite for the romantic image. But it turned out to be even harder to escape from the duende than to find it. For better or for worse, this concept holds sway over the American reception of Lorca, although the duende itself is not nearly as prevalent during the earlier stages of this reception. Even my own initial interest in Lorca began with a similar enthusiasm for Spanish culture. Romantic constructions of Lorca as Andalusian genius have acquired a certain aura of inevitability. They should be exposed to critical scrutiny, but not dismissed out of hand, since they are the source of Lorca’s continuing appeal. My current view of Lorca is rooted in the equally romantic concept of “negative capability,” defined by John Keats as the capability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”4 My working hypothesis is that Lorca is an internally contradictory figure rather than a transparently cohesive one.5 It is extraordinarily difficult to arrive at a global sense of who he really was, of what his work, taken together, might Federico García Lorca (Himself ) 



signify. Apocryphal Lorcas proliferate because, like Yeats, he was a man of many masks, a protean figure rather than an easily classifiable one. The poet’s brother Francisco García Lorca describes his artistic development, in both poetry and drama, as “a continuous metamorphosis” from one work to the next, rather than a process of logical development or maturation.6 Harold Bloom, although fully in thrall to the ideology of genius, also recognizes Lorca’s plurality: “Lorca is many poets at once: the singer of the Gypsy Ballads, the tragic dramatist of Yerma and Blood Wedding, the hyperbolical surrealist of Poet in New York, the quasi-Moorish elegist of The Tamarit Divan.”7 Nevertheless, Bloom goes on to interpret Lorca’s work, in typically North American fashion, through the archetype of the duende: a recognition of Lorca’s inchoate multiplicity does not necessarily lead to a suspicion of this unifying idea. 8 An awareness of the inherent difficulty of defining Lorca’s poetic achievement runs through the writings of his savviest readers. Robert H. Russell states the problem succinctly: “For to read Lorca well is to avoid a series of traps and pitfalls, some almost endemic to his personality, others the result of the aura that the poet’s times cast upon him.”9 Lorca’s charismatic personality, his iconic cultural status, his homo­ sexuality, the circumstances of his premature, tragic death, and the unstable textual history of many of his major works—all these factors set him off from his contemporaries, whose literary work is customarily read with much less attention to biography.10 The idea that Lorca’s life can explain the work, however, implies that we know exactly who Lorca is in the first place. Luis Fernández Cifuentes cites Borges (citing Bloy) to protest against the assumption of transparency that he finds— and harshly criticizes—in Ian Gibson’s biography of the poet: “No hay en la tierra un ser humano capaz de decir quién es, con certidumbre” [There is no human being on earth capable of saying who he/she is, with certainty].11 Fernández Cifuentes also denounces an “exasperating reductivism and superficial sociology that would embarrass the most naive doctoral student.”12 Gibson defines himself primarily as a biographer and historian, not as a literary critic; his contribution to  

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Lorca studies, beginning with his 1972 book investigating the poet’s murder in Granada, has been inestimable. Yet the gulf between his understanding of the circumstances of Lorca’s life and his literary naiveté is disturbing. Following Fernández Cifuentes, I would contend that Lorca is precisely the type of author who most requires a sophisticated critical approach informed by the precepts of modern literary theory. Unfortunately, Lorca is the modern Spanish poet most likely to be subjected to naive readings that fail to distinguish between the biographical subject, the implied author, and the poetic speaker, or that view his symbols as a kind of secret code to be deciphered. This Keatsian understanding of Lorca as a protean literary figure does not preclude a certain amount of “irritable reaching after fact and reason” in my own attempt to understand his work and the complicated history of its reception. In fact, I would contend that a certain irritability is a necessary quality in any good reader of Lorca. Lorca is a much more rewarding poet as a set of critical problems than as an object of hagiography. One of the traps in reading Lorca is the assumption that there is a central myth or conflict, a “master-narrative” equally applicable to the early lyrics, the romances, the experimental theater, the rural tragedies, and the late poetry. The existence of several competing and contradictory visions of Lorca’s work is one indication that none is sufficient in itself. The most rudimentary level of scholarship is sufficient to dismiss the simplistic caricature of Lorca as the poet of the gypsies. Other views, however, are more tenacious. One fairly prevalent view is that Lorca’s work can be explained almost entirely in terms of his inner conflict over his sexual identity. This is not so much an erroneous view as an incomplete and reductive one. This problem is indeed a central one in El público and Oda a Walt Whitman, but it is not necessarily the single interpretative key that will explain every word that he wrote. The assumption that the entire meaning of the literary work of a gay writer is that the author is gay is not only reductive but, in the end, merely tautological. For Foucault, sex has become “the explanation for everything.”13 If sexuality constitutes the inner truth of personality, then biographical explanations will naturally give it pride Federico García Lorca (Himself ) 



of place. I believe, however, that it is naive to assume that the variegated explorations of sexuality in Lorca’s work can be traced back to a unitary biographical cause. Are all his dramatic characters and poetic speakers merely projections of the Lorca himself? Are the secrets behind his work more significant than the work itself ? If Lorca’s life does not explain his work, his death has even less explanatory power. The circumstances of his murder during the initial stage of the Spanish civil war have had a disproportionate effect on his poetic afterlife. The Franco regime was all too happy to accept JeanLouis Schonberg’s hypothesis that the ultimate motive for his killing was homosexual jealousy: that narrative, along with the idea of Lorca as a naive and politically unengaged writer, deflected the blame from the military uprising and the Spanish Falange. Schonberg, not coinci­ dentally, insisted on seeing homosexuality as an interpretative key to all of Lorca’s work. Ian Gibson’s 1972 book The Death of Lorca, in a crucial act of historical revision, correctly reassigned the blame for Lorca’s killing on the political repression in Granada. There is an ongoing battle over the exhumation of Lorca’s body from its original resting place—a step that Gibson is advocating against the resistance of the Lorca family.14 This heightened attention to Lorca’s historical legacy in the wake of the one hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1998 and the ongoing debate over the “Ley de Memoria Histórica” [Law of Historical Memory], passed by the Spanish Cortes in 2007, is legitimate. My own book, in fact, forms part of the larger effort on the part of many scholars to come to terms with Lorca’s ongoing literary, cultural, and historical legacy. My particular interest, however, is not in the value of his body as a political symbol in the debate over Spanish historical memory, but in the ongoing capacity of his poetry to generate new critical readings and textual transformations. In some sense, the image we construct of Lorca as biographical and authorial subject should not matter: aren’t his works the same whether we attribute them to a naive or to a savvy creator? While I tend to reject biography as an explanatory mode, Lorca’s life and death do play an undeniable role in his reception both in Spain and internationally.  

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The “American Lorca” who is the subject of this book is not a corpus of texts, but an authorial construction with pronounced ideological effects. As Foucault argues in his classic essay “What is an Author?,” the “author-function” sets a given corpus apart and assigns it to a particular discursive universe: The author’s name serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse: the fact that the discourse has an author’s name, that one can say “this was written by so-and-so” or “so-and-so is its author,” shows that this discourse is not everyday ordinary speech that merely comes and goes, not something that is immediately consumable. On the contrary, it is a speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status.15

Foucault goes on to argue that the “plurality of self ” (which I have been attributing specifically to Lorca) is a characteristic of “all discourses endowed with the author-function.”16 In other words, the attribution of every poem, play, lecture, manuscript correction, and personal letter written by the same individual to a single function has the effect of lumping together widely divergent enunciatory positions. In Lorca’s case this plurality is especially noteworthy, given the stylistic and generic multiplicity of his work: some examples might be the authorial figure (“el poeta”) who addresses the audience in the prologue to a puppet play, the “I” of a short lyric poem like “Casida del llanto,” and the biographical subject who writes letters to his family from New York. We also attribute the words spoken by dramatic characters in Bodas de sangre, Así que pasen cinco años, and El público to the same author-function, though not directly to “Lorca” as a speaking subject. To make Lorca a singular rather than a plural subject, to sum him up in a single noun or adjective (Lorca, duende, lorquian, lorcaesque), is to commit an astounding ideological reduction.17 Just as the “intentional fallacy” is sometimes forgotten in biographical readings of Lorca’s work, so too is the idea that the speaker of the poem is not to be identified with the poet as a matter of course. Even in his lyric production, Lorca is primarily a dramatic writer, employing Federico García Lorca (Himself ) 



variegated poetic speakers and wearing a mask even, or especially, at his most intimate moments. A stylized, nonindividuated voice, reminiscent of anonymous lyrics of the medieval period, often appears in the Canciones and Suites. The elegiac voice of “Llanto por Igacio Sánchez Mejías” speaks in the first person, but also in a highly stylized voice. In many very direct lyric poems from these books, there are no markers of the first person at all. “Canción del jinete” [“Rider’s Song”] and “La casada infiel” [“The Unfaithful Wife”] are dramatic monologues featuring identifiable first person speakers clearly differentiated from the perspective of the implied author.18 Another modality is the third person narrator of many poems of the Romancero gitano, who occasionally jumps through the fictional frame to interpellate his characters directly: Antoñito el Camborio, in his agony, addresses this narrator directly as “Federico García” and asks him to call the Guardia Civil.19 In the places where Lorca’s own autobiographical self would appear to be most in evidence, finally, the language often becomes densely metaphorical, as if to compensate for this seeming directness. The hyperbolic autobiographical speaker of many of the poem in Poeta en Nueva York is a case in point. The larger point here is that a poem by Lorca is a work of fiction, not a biographical document. The flesh-and-blood Lorca never had a son named “Juan,” as the speaker of the “Iglesia Abandonada” did. He never rode to Córdoba on a pony like the speaker of “Canción de jinete”; in fact, he could not ride a horse at all. The multiplicity of enun­ciatory positions means that there is no typical speaker of a Lorca poem who can be identified unproblematically with the biographical author. Bio­ graphically minded criticism does not always require a first person lyric speaker identifiable with the author, but the absence of a clearly defined self at the center of Lorca’s poetry is, at the very least, a serious complication. Despite the massive attention to Lorca’s life, the intellectual biography of Lorca has yet to be written.20 Perhaps some have assumed that there would be nothing to write about, that an intellectual biography  

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of the child genius would be a contradiction in terms. The underestimation of Lorca’s intellectual capability and knowledge of literary history remains an obstacle to a fuller understanding of his work. In Spanish-speaking contexts, the idea of Lorca as a childlike innocent has had a long history, as Julián Jiménez Heffernan points out: “Lorca y Vallejo han sido durante demasiado tiempo nuestros poetas tontos, aplastados por dos losas absurdas, el infantalismo y el indigenismo.”21 [Lorca and Vallejo have for too long been our dumb poets, flattened out by two absurd tombstones, infantilism and indigenism.] Unfortunately, however, infantilism is only one of the burdens Lorca has had to bear. At various points in his reception in Spain and internationally, Lorca has been cast in the roles of the childlike innocent, the naive neopopularist, the primitive poet of myth, the gypsy singer of the cante jondo and the duende, and the surrealist channeler of unconscious urges. He has been the object of condescension among his more scholarly inclined contemporaries, and the posthumous sponsor of anti-intellectual poetics in both the U.S. and in Spain. A recognition of Lorca’s literary intelligence underlies the best critical and bibliographical work currently being done on the Spanish poet and playwright. An examination at his complete career, encompassing everything from his juvenilia to his late experiments, calls into question the myth of the poet as an untutored or naive creator. My own understanding of Lorca’s literary and intellectual development is derived from my own rereading of the primary texts in light of the most astute recent Lorca scholarship. I see Lorca, first of all, as a self-aware artist with a deep and nuanced understanding of the Spanish literary tradition. A canny writer rather than a naive one, he was able to create convincingly modern works that draw intertextually on medieval, renaissance, baroque, and nineteenth-century sources. Equally conversant with popular and with learnèd styles of a thousand-year old tradition, he was also a leading figure in the Spanish avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. He achieved popularity with works like Romancero gitano, but distrusted the sources of his own popularity, coming to distrust and even despise his own popular identification with gypsy Federico García Lorca (Himself ) 



imagery and with Lorquismo generally. Writing with great popular success for the stage (after some initial flops), he also wrote avant-garde plays that could not be performed in the theater of his own day. From a global reading of his poetry, plays, correspondence, and lectures we can surmise that Lorca was, in the first place, an astute reader of Jorge Manrique, Garcilaso de la Vega, Cervantes, Saint John of the Cross, Luis de Góngora, Pedro Soto de Rojas, Lope de Vega, Santa Teresa de Ávila, Calderón de la Barca, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rubén Darío, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, as well as a serious student of traditional poetry in the anonymous tradition. In the theater, he was conversant with the work of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hugo, Ibsen, Galdós, Benavente, ValleInclán, Pirandello) and the classic Spanish comedia of the early modern period, along with Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians. This is not an exhaustive list: according to his brother Francisco, Federico was a voracious reader who possessed a high degree of general culture, despite being a rather poor student.22 By the poet’s own account, he listened to around a thousand lectures at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, where he lived during most of his twenties.23 Despite his identification with primordial Spain, Lorca was, in fact, a cosmopolitan intellectual who came of age during the epoch of the historical avantgarde in Europe.24 The scope of Lorca’s readings is evident in the stylistic variety of his literary production: in the difference between one play, one book of poetry, and the following one. In his chameleon-like mastery of multiple poetic styles, Lorca might be seen as typical of the poets of his so-called generation. His contemporaries Rafael Alberti and Gerardo Diego were also capable of moving from one style to the next—neopopular, neobaroque, or avant-garde—with virtuosic facility. What differentiates Lorca from these poets, however, is the depth with which he explores these stylistic models. While capable of mimicry and pastiche, Lorca also understood the literary tradition from within, profoundly reinterpreting classic forms. He often worked by combining 10 

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elements from two or more periods of literary history in order to create new hybrids. In Romancero gitano [Gypsy ballads], for example, Lorca superimposes complex metaphors, reminiscent of seventeenth-century baroque poetry but also of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, on the tradition of the anonymous romances [ballads] first transcribed and collected in the fifteenth century. Lorca uses this hybrid genre in the creation of a mythic Andalusia represented by his Gypsy prota­ gonists. This work, then, is not a simple neopopularist pastiche of the tra­ditional Spanish ballad or romance. Since this book brought Lorca his initial fame, it is sometimes regarded as a concession to popular taste, yet it also contains some of Lorca’s most metaphorically dense and difficult poems. The sheer quantity of Lorca’s writing, along with its scope and variety, is evidence of a strong work ethic and an extraordinary intellectual restlessness. Since he did not live past the age of thirty-eight, his entire literary production took shape in a relatively short span of time. In 1920, at the age of twenty-two, he completed his first published collection of poetry, Libro de poemas [Book of poems] and staged his first (unsuccessful) dramatic production with El maleficio de la mariposa [The butterfly’s curse]. By critical consensus both works are still rather immature in their conception, so we can place Lorca’s entire mature work within the sixteen-year period between 1921 and 1936. His achievement in lyric poetry during this period would be impressive in itself, even if he were not also one of the major European dramatists of the century. He wrote over a dozen major works of poetry and drama between Poema del cante jondo [Poem of the deep song] (written in November 1921 but not published until 1931) and his final play, La casa de Bernarda Alba [The house of Bernarda Alba]. If Lorca’s contemporary Jorge Guillén had died at the age of thirtyeight, in 1931, he would be remembered only as the author of the 1928 edition of Cántico, an impressive but slim collection of lyric poetry. Lorca’s more extensive and varied literary production prompts us to divide his career into several distinct phases, but, in an equivalent span of time, Guillén produced only his very early work. Walter Benjamin Federico García Lorca (Himself ) 

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makes this key observation in his essay “The Storyteller”: “‘A man who dies at the age of thirty-five,’ said Moritz Heimann once, ‘is at every point in his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.’ Nothing is more dubious than this sentence—but for the sole reason that the tense is wrong. A man—so says the truth that was meant here—who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who died at thirty-five.”25 So it is with Lorca, who died at the age of thirty-eight: our perspective on his career is conditioned by our knowledge of the terminal point in his life and career. Before producing his mature work Lorca put himself through a literary apprenticeship, beginning at a very young age and extending into his early twenties, during which he imitated and mastered the poetic and theatrical styles available to him. We learn from the redoubtable historian and biographer Ian Gibson that “Lorca inherited all the vig­our of a speech that springs from the earth and expresses itself with extraordinary spontaneity.”26 What makes a statement like this worth questioning is that it is typical of a widespread attitude toward the Spanish poet. We might note, in the first place, the romantic ideology implicit in the image of a language that “springs from the earth”—a conception wholly at odds with the lessons of modern linguistics. The idea that the mature style of Bodas de sangre [Blood wedding] was merely the poet’s natural inheritance also begs the question of why there is only one Lorca: if the stylized dialogue of his plays were simply the result of tape recording the vigorous speech of Andalusian peasants, then the native soil from which Lorca sprang would have produced many other spontaneous geniuses of the same type. To posit the poet as a native product of his soil is also to ignore the evidence showing that Lorca’s “spontaneity” was a hard-earned achieve­ ment rather than an effortless birthright: a reading of his juvenilia shows that the very early Lorca, chronologically closer to a state of childhood innocence, was an imitator of the ornate fin-de-siècle style of Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Lorca had to fight his way through to his mature style, freeing himself from the cloying preciosity and derivativeness of his teenage work. A look at his theatrical juvenilia, usefully col12 

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lected in a critical edition by Andrés Soria Olmedo, reveals a similarly arduous process of literary apprenticeship.27 The fact that Lorca’s very early writings read like juvenilia rather than works of genius is fully to be expected: these writings reveal a diligent young writer systematically teaching himself to write by imitating the prevalent stylistic models of the day, not a feverish poet inspired by daimonic powers. A look at Lorca’s typical creative process reveals two methods that are different from each other but not necessarily antithetical: he nurtured and developed some poetic projects over relatively long stretches of time, taking them apart and putting them back together again. Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York] and Suites are good examples of this process.28 In other cases, he mulled over a project for a relatively long period of time, allowing it to develop in his mind, and then wrote a more or less definitive version in a few days “as though in a fever of creation.”29 While clearly different from each other, neither pattern reveals a purely spontaneous, unreflective approach to literary creation. The preceding description of Lorca’s writing career ought to put to rest the strawman view of Lorca as a kind of idiot savant of literature, a creator of pure genius whose level of literary culture was rudimentary.30 It is hard to imagine, in fact, why Lorca’s level of literary erudition was ever doubted. Perhaps an emphasis on book learning is at odds with the ideology of genius: Lorca did not pursue an academic career and appeared to be relatively unlearnèd when compared to the eminent “poet-professors” of his own epoch, like Dámaso Alonso, Jorge Guillén, and Pedro Salinas. At one point Guillén himself encouraged the younger Lorca to pursue such a career—an idea that horrified Lorca’s friend Salvador Dalí.31 As Dalí realized, Lorca did not have an academic or scholarly temperament, despite his assimilation of thousands of pages of literature. His erudition was more of the performative and pragmatic type. Although he toyed briefly with the idea of being a professor like Guillén, he ultimately preferred giving lectures to writing essays, directing golden age plays to editing critical editions of them. The kind of intuitive and performative intelligence that Lorca possessed is often perceived as less intellectual and theoretical than Federico García Lorca (Himself ) 

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analytically based modes of scholarship. Although Lorca never positioned himself as an systematic theorist of poetry, his lectures do in fact reveal an astute critical mind and a considerable level of erudition. The well-known lecture on the duende is a case in point: this short prosepiece written for oral performance is allusive to the point of being nearly incomprehensible to the average undergraduate Spanish major in an American university circa 2008. Lorca’s multifaceted definition of the duende is not easy to grasp even when the references are explained. This lecture is not, in any case, a straightforward description of Lorca’s own creative process that can be taken at face value, but a complexly metaphorical description of a concept that continually changes shape before the eyes of the reader. Is the duende a principle that applies mostly to bullfighting and cante jondo, a mostly performative principle? Or is it principle of artistic creation most comparable to the inspiring muse or the angel? Is it specific to Spanish culture or is it a principle that could be applied to Nietzsche, Goethe, Socrates, and other names that Lorca cites? Through his allusive and metaphorically dense presentation, Lorca introduces layer upon layer of complication rather than taking us closer to a clear delineation of the concept. The underestimation of the complexity of Lorca’s work takes another, more subtle form in commentators who contrast the facile neo­ popularist author of works like Poema del cante jondo, Romancero gitano, and Bodas de sangre, to the avant-garde experimenter of Poeta en Nueva York and El público [The audience]. The first to take a disparaging view of Lorca’s neopopularist works were Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, who felt that their friend was not sufficiently avant-garde. The “Andalusian dog” of their film collaboration Le chien Andalou is Lorca himself, seen as a hapless neurotic.32 The young novísimo poet Guillermo Carnero, writing in 1976, expresses interest only in Poeta en Nueva York, and attributes the popularity of Lorca to political motivations (the circumstances surrounding his death) and to “la musicalidad magis­ tral de la parte menos interesante de su obra” [the magisterial musicality of the least interesting part of his work].33 The celebration of the avant-garde Lorca corrects the balance by em­ phasizing works dismissed or neglected by earlier critics. Yet the dichot14 

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omy of the neopopularist and the avant-garde Lorca has the unfortunate effect of understating the originality, complexity, and inherent difficulty of his seemingly more conventional works. It is only the existence of the avant-garde Lorca, in other words, that makes the neopopularist works seem transparent by comparison. Carnero himself suggests that Lorca’s poetry is stylistically as complex as that of other, similar poets of the same period, who never gained Lorca’s level of popularity. The difficulty of these poets was held against them, but an exception was made for Lorca.34 Romancero gitano combines popularity and difficulty in exactly this way. The musicality of Lorca’s handling of the romance form, the popularity of a few of the simpler poems in this book (like the unfortunate “La casada infiel”), and the sheer familiarity of the book conspire to make this book seem much less challenging than it actually is.35 It is an irony of literary history that Lorca was not surrealist enough for Dalí and Buñuel, since after his death he became the model for “Spanish surrealism” in the United States. American admirers of Lorca typically do not distinguish strongly between the neopopular and the avant-garde Lorca in the first place. They tend to see the enigmatic and irrational images of Poema del cante jondo as more or less “surrealistic.” Perhaps this view is not as erroneous as it might appear: Lorca himself invoked the duende in public readings of Poeta en Nueva York, associating the “black sounds” of the cante with the more avant-garde phase of his own poetry. While the poet himself felt ambivalent about his own popularity, he himself did not establish a rigid distinction between poetic works in different styles. The dismissal of certain facets of Lorca’s work might also derive from the fallacy of identifying Lorca with the sources of his inspiration or with his dramatic personae. Visions of Lorca as a childlike innocent, an untutored folksinger, or a duende-possessed surrealist conflate the artistic creator with the poetic voice. The mistake is identical whether the critic happens to be praising or disparaging these particular aspects of Lorca’s poetry. The childlike tone of some of his earlier poetry is the result of a deliberate assumption of a lyrical mask, not of the poet’s literally childlike character. In similar fashion, Lorca’s exploration of the gypsy myth in Poema del cante jondo and Romancero gitano is that of Federico García Lorca (Himself ) 

15

an intellectual poet looking for inspiration in the culture of a marginal group, not that of a gypsy cantaor. Visions of Lorca’s poetry, both in Spain and internationally, are often tinged with a certain orientalism, but Lorca’s own vision of the gyp­ sies is already is that of an orientalist. Charnon-Deutsch points out the Lorca occupies the position of an intellectual patron of Caló [Gypsy] culture: Lorca’s most famous collection of poems, Romancero gitano (Gypsy ballads), written between 1924 and 1927, also capitalized on Spanish fin-desiècle escapism by sustaining the myth of a mysterious and tragic people living outside the confines of bourgeois society. By exalting the Gypsy as poetic subject, Lorca lent prestige to the community that would have international reverberations, but his relation to the actual Calés otherwise differed little from that of other señoritos whose patronage system was responsible for perpetuating mercenary relations with Caló entertainers.36

Charnon-Deutsch goes on to cite a letter from Lorca to Guillén, in which the author of Romancero gitano distances himself from the gypsy theme: “Los gitanos son un tema. Y nada más. [...] Además el gitanismo me da un tono de incultura, de falta de educación y de poeta salvaje que tú sabes bien no soy.”37 [The gypsies are a theme. And nothing more. Furthermore, this gitanismo gives me a tone of unculturedness, of lack of education, and of being a savage poet, which you know very well I am not.] Soria Olmedo also quotes from this same letter, along with others written to Bergamín and Melchor Fernández Almagro that express similar sentiments.38 It should be noted that these letters date from 1927, before the actual publication of the book the following year. There is a certain preemptive defensiveness, then, in Lorca’s atti­ tude toward his own work: he needs to mark his distance from more vulgarly orientalist visions of the gypsies, as well as from the sources of his own incipient popularity. In his own mind, he was not a gypsy poet or even a poet of the gypsies, not a poet of folklore. He despised the lorquian kitsch that was already taking shape before the publication of his most famous book.39 16 

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Lorca published Poema del cante jondo in 1931, ten years after its actual composition, and he gave his famous duende lecture in Buenos Aires in 1933. In other words, he continued to exploit the gypsy theme well after the publication of Romancero gitano, despite his evident discomfort with the misconstrual of his position that would inevitably ensue.40 If he had wanted to dissociate himself from gypsy and Andalusian themes during the last phase of his career he could have done so much more emphatically, but the truth is that he remained engaged in the reinterpretation of the Andalusian myth to the end of his life, as is evident in one the last poetic works that he completed before his death, the posthumously published Diván del Tamarit. The championing of the difficult, avant-garde Lorca against the more facile and popular poet, then, overlooks the complexity of the neopopularist work as well as the lack of a clear dividing line between poetic works of different types. Lorca is a paradoxical figure: if we view him as an inspired, duende-possessed poet, then he is equally inspired in Poema del cante jondo and in Poeta en Nueva York. If, on the other hand, we view him more as a self-aware architect, then we must recognize this quality in both the rural tragedies and the experimental plays. Whether we view Lorca as an intellectual who distrusted the intellect, or as naïf with profoundly intellectual intuitions, the apparent “clarity” of some of Lorca’s works only deepens the mystery. My aim here has been to suggest that “Lorca” is a complex authorfunction not susceptible to easy reductions. The best critical work is often that which explicates a single work in detail, or addresses a fairly narrow textual or interpretative problem, rather than attempting to arrive at a totalizing “theory of Lorca” that will reconcile all the conflicting data. It might be objected that what I have provided here is an erudite, artistically self-conscious Lorca that responds to the requirements of my own critical agenda. While I cannot conceal my personal preference for a more ambivalent, self-conscious, and intellectual Lorca, my ultimate argument is for a recognition of a high degree of au­thorial plurality and complexity. Within this more complex construction of Federico García Lorca (Himself ) 

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Lorca, of course, we must also come to terms with Lorca’s own exploitation of seemingly simple modes. The idea of Lorca as a well-read, self-conscious, and astute artist is tacitly assumed in the work of the best scholars and critics in the field, even when they do not feel the need to argue for this view explicitly. Nevertheless, more simplistic views of the poet persist in the popular imagination and around the edges of Lorca scholarship. It is still possible to hear weak presentations at otherwise respectable academic conferences that offer reductive and distorted readings of Lorca, falling back on all of the old clichés. Perhaps because of the legacy of Lorca’s problematic reception, a bad paper on Lorca tends to be much worse than the typically mediocre paper on almost any other modern Spanish author. If the Spanish professors giving such papers can fall victim to such pitfalls, so too can English-speaking readers of poetry whose knowledge of Lorca is mediated through American poets and translators. It is not necessarily the case that these American popularizers of Lorca are unsubtle thinkers—although in a few cases they are—but that their reasons for valuing Lorca are specific to the context of U.S. literature and culture. What is sacrificed in the process, logically, is the Spanish cultural context of which Lorca formed a part. Their aim is not the scholarly one of understanding Lorca as he really is, or Lorca in the context of the larger Hispanic literary tradition. The lack of scholarly rigor in the American reception of Lorca is particularly evident in the widespread view that he is a “surrealist,” and, in fact, the best example of the wider phemonenon known as “Spanish surrealism.” It might be surprising, to readers of American poetry, that the consensus among contemporary scholars is that Lorca was not a surrealist at all. The idea of a Hispanic or “Spanish surrealism” is a confusing and problematic one in the first place. There were, in fact, Spanish-speaking poets and painters who were directly engaged in the international Surrealist movement, including Mexican poet Octavio Paz and a group of poets from Tenerife clustered around the Gaceta de Arte.41 On the other hand, most of the poets commonly cited as “surrealists” in the North American context—Neruda, Lorca, Aleixandre— were not actually affiliated with surrealism in any way. These poets 18 

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were, to widely varying degrees, influenced by surrealism or by a certain “surrealist atmosphere” in Spanish-language poetry during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Among these poets, Lorca was probably the least involved with surrealism itself: unlike Aleixandre or Cernuda, he never applied this label to his own work. It might seem pedantic to insist on this more narrow, nominalist definition of surrealism, confining this label to those who actually participated in the international Surrealist movement headed by André Breton.42 Paul Ilie, in a 1968 book, argued for the existence of a broader “Surrealist Mode” in Spanish literature.43 The problem with a broader defintion, however, is evident in Ilie’s choice of texts: if the term surrealist is cut loose from its ties to surrealism itself, then everything and anything can fit into this category—even the plays of  ValleInclán. Surrealism, the proper name of a particular movement within the avant-garde, becomes synonymous with the avant-garde itself, and thus loses its definitional core. This effect is greatly magnified in translation: a poet like César Vallejo, who was actively hostile to surrealism, is still sometimes cited in the U.S. as a part of a wider Hispanic surrealism. The tendency among scholars writing after Ilie, then, has been to insist on more rigorous and historically grounded definitions.44 Despite the definitional clarity gained by separating Lorca from Surrealism, there are historical reasons that have made it impossible for me to leave behind this term in the writing of this book. It is easy to see why Lorca would have been seen as a surrealist from the U.S. perspective. His association with Salvador Dalí and admiration for Joan Miró, the visual style of his own drawings, and the “irrational” imagery of Poet en Nueva York, made this identification all but inevitable. Since surrealism itself did not have a strong presence in American poetry during the modernist period, almost any poetry bearing the slightest resemblance to surrealism was likely to have been viewed as “surrealist” in the broadest sense, even if Lorca was the least surrealist of the poets influenced in broad terms by surrealism itself. What is more, the scholarly consensus that Lorca was not, in fact, a surrealist had not yet been established during the period when he was most influential in the U.S.: the period from the 1950s through Federico García Lorca (Himself ) 

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the 1970s. The debate about whether Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York was directly inspired by surrealism has been going on for many years, with nuanced arguments on either side. Anecdotal influence suggests that those not directly involved in this debate—specialists in other areas of Hispanic literature, for instance—continue to think of Lorca as a sur­ realist to this day. The misidentification of Lorca and other Spanishlanguage poets as surrealists is, in some sense, a fait accompli. It is undeniably true that the historical Lorca, “Lorca himself,” was not a member of the movement, but it is also an historical fact that the term surrealism has been used in a looser, improper sense in Spain, Latin America, and the English-speaking world for many decades, to refer to many poets influenced by surrealism at one or two removes from André Breton’s movement. A larger point to be made here is that current scholarly views of Lorca are not likely to line up neatly with popular ideas about his work that motivated American Lorquismo circa 1957. The belated publication of Lorca’s Sonetos del amor oscuro in the 1980s provides another exam­ ple of this temporal gap.45 These openly homoerotic sonnets were not avail­able to gay poets of the 1950s like Duncan, Spicer, O’Hara, and Ginsberg. This sequence of sonnets is highly significant for anyone wanting to understand Lorca’s work, but its late publication prevented it having an impact on the development of American poetry at midcentury.46 In any case, the neobaroque formalism of Lorca’s late sonnets might not have appealed to the American poets who took up his cause in the 1950s, who were mostly interested in finding alternatives to the metrical verse of the “academic” poets of their own time. For American poets, Lorca represented “deep song” and “Spanish surrealism.” It is sig­ nificant that among poets of the generation that created the American Lorca, only Jerome Rothenberg has returned to a work of Lorca’s that was not available to readers during the 1950s and 1960s, in his translation of the Suites (see chapter 7). If American poets have read Lorca in limited or partial ways, it is equally true that my own study reflects the biases inherent in my own 20 

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perspective. In particular, I have chosen to focus my attention on a group of poets who came of age during the cold war. While American poets continue to be inspired by Lorca’s poetry to the present day, my contention is that the most significant impact on American poetry occurs in the work of the influential poets associated with the New American Poetry. In part, this perspective relies on my assumption that poets like Ginsberg, O’Hara, and Duncan are themselves major poets who left an indelible mark on American poetry and culture of this period.

Federico García Lorca (Himself ) 

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2 The American Agenda What is it you have come to tell me, Garcia Lorca? Asleep in the tear-staind moon you are not poet, not lover, but one of the dead ones who inhabit the moon. Robert Duncan1 Of the poems, let me use Lorca’s term: duende is that faculty of making / into which you subsume yourself, your nickel, your dime, your cruzeiro, your fivedollar gold piece, your talent, your silver mark, or dernier, a goddamn ha’penny, if that’s all you’re carrying around in your pocket that day, you lay it on the line, it’s payment, to whatever devil or demon wishes (with that idea or feeling IT feels itself itself, it’s [sic] owner, if you like) to take possession of the THING in you, giving that quality to the process.  Paul Blackburn2

I. Cold War Lorca

Accounts of Lorca’s influence in the United States have often been celebratory, emphasizing the inspiration that American poets have taken from their Spanish precursor. My own perspective is more skeptical: it is not that Lorca has had a negative effect on American poetry, but that he has been Americanized beyond recognition, made to serve a variety of domestic interests. One of the “scandals of translation,” according to Lawrence Venuti, is its ability to decontextualize a foreign literature: Translation wields enormous power in constructing representations of foreign cultures. The selection of foreign texts and the development of translation strategies can establish peculiarly domestic canons for

22

foreign literatures, canons that conform to domestic esthetic values and therefore reveal exclusions and admissions, centers and peripheries that deviate from those current in the foreign language.3

This is exactly what has happened to Lorca in the United States: he has become the archetypal Spanish poet for American readers, at the center of a new canon of poetry-in-translation that would be unrecognizable to a Spanish literary historian. Venuti is rightly suspicious of this domestication. It should be pointed out, though, that the original canon in the foreign language arises out of an analogous process of “exclusions and admissions, centers and peripheries”: in this sense translation is not the distortion of an original state of grace (defined in and by the source culture), but rather an additional complication of an already messy situation. As we saw in the last chapter, it is impossible to return to Spain to find “Lorca himself.” Understood within the context of Spanish literary history, the poet already bears the impossible burden of having to represent a cultural essence. If American readers are wrong to see him as the embodiment of Romantic Spain, they are wrong in exactly the way that many Spaniards have been. Furthermore, there is no firm line of demarcation between the national (Spanish) and the international reception of Lorca, whether among scholars, poets, or ordinary readers. Many of the most prominent scholars in this field are Spaniards or Latin Americans living in the English-speaking world, or else natives of the United States, the British Isles, France, and Italy. Lorca’s international celebrity has kept pace with his canonical status within Spanish literature, and his poetic influence has been stronger in the United States than in Spain during the cold war period. American poets and translators, along with the domestic constituencies they serve, have rarely had serious misgivings about appropriating Lorca for their own ends. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, they wanted to know what Lorca could do for their country, not what their country could do for Lorca. The need to fit Lorca into a specifically domestic (American) project has always been of greater urgency for The American Agenda 

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translators than the scholarly task of situating him within the context of Spanish literary history. This is true even of more recent translators: Mark Statman and Pablo Medina, for example, situate their 2008 version of Poet in New York against the backdrop of the events of September 11, 2001.4 Is this an act of cultural appropriation, in which a foreign text is made to serve a specifically domestic agenda? Obviously it is. Yet Lorca’s book was written in New York, and was first published there in 1940 in a bilingual edition, long before it became available to readers in Spain. From this perspective, Poet in New York could be considered a hybrid work, one that properly belongs neither to Spanish nor to American literature. Despite his early fame in the English-speaking world, Lorca did not attain truly iconic status within American culture until the 1950s.5 The first book-length translations were British rather than American: A.L. Lloyd’s Lament for the Death of the Bullfighter (1937) and Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili’s The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca (1939). Contemporary American reviews of both volumes emphasized the primitive “barbarity” of Lorca’s poetry, its roots in a folkloric tradition of Southern Spain. In the case of Lloyd, the reviewers were taking their cues from the translator’s own preface when they refer to a poetry “inspired by the primitive, dramatic and exotic folk poetry of Andalusia, by the cante hondo and cante flamenco, the bitter, barbarous folk music of the South.”6 Although the American reception of Lorca gave prominence to this “folkloric” dimension from the very beginning, the notion of the duende, which later became synonymous with Lorca’s po­ etics for most American readers, was not used in the United States until 1955. My discussion of this key concept, then, will come at the end of this chapter rather than the beginning. In some sense, the duende represents the fossilization of American Lorquismo, its definitive transformation into a kind of orientialist kitsch. In contrast, the process that precedes this fossilization is more fluid and dynamic. William Carlos Williams’s 1939 essay “Federico García Lorca,” which first appeared in Partisan Review, marks a significant point in the American reception of Lorca. Instead of commenting on Lorca’s poetry in depth, Williams offers a capsule summary of the Spanish poetic tradi24 

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tion, beginning with the anonymous medieval epic El Cantar del Mío Cid. Placing Lorca against the backdrop of literary history, he emphasizes national identity (Lorca as a prototypically Spanish writer) and the development of a vernacular, indigenous poetics.7 Williams, too, was engaged in a lifelong struggle to develop a national poetics based on the “American idiom”: Lorca serves as an implicit model for this project, although Williams himself does not make this connection explicit. Edwin Honig’s 1944 García Lorca, one of the first book-length studies of the poet in English, also situates Lorca in relation to several major strands of his Spanish and specifically Andalusian literary heritage, especially the medieval cancionero, Baroque poetry, and the cante jondo.8 While interest in Lorca grows throughout the 1950s and 1960s, later poets do not tend to offer such richly contextualized views of Lorca. Whatever domestic interests they might have had, both Williams and Honig are explicitly oriented toward the foreign context (Lorca in Spain) rather than to their own explicit agenda. Later writers tend to look at Lorca more selfishly, as a source for their own projects, and hence feel less of a need for historical contextualization. Along with Honig’s historically significant García Lorca, the 1940s also saw Rolfe Humphries’s translation of Poet in New York, which was actually the first edition of the work in any language.9 New Directions also brought out a version of Lorca’s Three Tragedies in 1947. Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer first became aware of Lorca in the latter years of this decade, as did Kenneth Koch, while a student at Harvard, and Jerome Rothenberg, who was still a high school student.10 In my view, the period of Lorca’s greatest impact on American poetry stretches roughly from the late 1940s or early 1950s to the early 1970s: roughly from the 1951 publication of Langston Hughes’s Gypsy Ballads to Robert Bly’s 1973 Jiménez & Lorca: Selected Poems. The high-water mark for American Lorquismo occurs in a shorter period between 1955, with the publication of Lorca’s Selected Poems in New Directions, and the early to mid-1960s, with the founding of the deep image school.11 Lorca’s influence is felt with most intensity among American poets associated with the various strands of The New American Poetry, the cluster of movements represented in Donald Allen’s landmark 1960 The American Agenda 

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anthology: the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, and the Black Mountain poets. In a follow-up volume, The Poetics of the New American Poetry (1973), Allen and coeditor Warren Tallman included a translation of Lorca’s lecture on the duende alongside the contributions of American poets—the only text not by an Anglophone writer in this book. It should be noted that such manifestoes and statements of poetics are extremely significant both in the American and the Spanish literary traditions. Beginning in the 1920s, many anthologies of Spanish poetry include a “poética” by each poet, a prose statement of his or her intentions. In parallel fashion, the avant-garde tradition in the United States also relies heavily on prose justifications. Of course, Lorca was also a guiding spirit for deep image poetry—a tendency not represented in The New American Poetry. The so-called Academic poets of this period, working in the tradition of Yeats and Auden, were less interested in Lorca, although some of these, like Donald Hall, later drifted into the orbit of deep image poetry and translated a few Lorca poems. “Confessional” poets (Lowell, Snodgrass, Plath, Berryman, Sexton) were also indifferent to Lorca.12 North American Lorquismo during this period had a musical dimension too, most notably in the compositions of George Crumb, who devoted himself to Lorca during a long stretch of time.13 On a more popular level, the Canadian poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen also became an intensely committed aficionado of the Spanish poet, going so far as to name his daughter Lorca Cohen.14 “Take This Waltz,” based on a translation of “Pequeño vals vienés,” is one of Cohen’s best-known songs. Joan Baez recorded versions of two Lorca poems on her 1968 spoken-word album Baptism.15 The entry of Lorca into American classical and popular music might be seen as a natural extension of his poetic influence rather than as a separate phenomenon. Poets, songwriters, and folksingers lived the same cultural reality. Cohen was a friend of Kenneth Koch; there is only one degree of separation between Joan Baez and Allen Ginsberg, who both knew Bob Dylan. Fans of folk music in the early 1960s (Baez, Dylan) were 26 

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also interested in flamenco and the folk music of Spain. The same sort of person who listened to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain might also have picked up a copy of Lorca’s Selected Poems or Belitt’s translation of The Poet in New York. I view the poets, musicians, and artists of the Cold War period as the originators of what we now know as multiculturalism, and Lorca as one of the first multicultural heroes of American culture. He has been invoked, at one time or another, as a patron saint of anti-Fascist and anticapitalist politics, African American and gay male identities, the poetics of the new American poetry, ethnopoetics, urban working-class experience, and the Jungian-inspired deep image. The common element in these varied uses is a resistance to the conformity and repression of cold war America: Lorca is likely to appear wherever there is a search for cultural alternatives to the ideology of the McCarthy era. Multiculturalism represents an openness both to international influences (Zen Buddhism, flamenco) and to the cultural diversity of the United States itself (jazz, Native American culture), as well as to liminal spaces, hybrid identities, and immigrant experiences. The desire to assimilate outside influences into the culture of the United States is not incompatible with a particular brand of “American exceptionalism” that arose in the postwar period. American cultural nationalism of the cold war was not isolationist or nativist in spirit, but expansionist, colonialist (just like U.S. foreign policy in the political arena). The typical poet of the 1950s, who might have been drawing inspiration from Mayan culture, Spanish-language poetry, or Zen Buddhism, was also quite likely to identify strongly with the overtly nationalist aesthetics of Walt Whitman, Williams Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, or Jackson Pollock.16 There is a complex dialectic at work in this cultural exceptionalism. On the one hand, there is the pervasive notion that a deeply flawed Western culture needs to open itself to non-Western influences. At the same time, many intellectuals of this period feel that the United States, as an outlier among Western nations, is uniquely positioned to take advantage of such influences. References to “America” in postwar literature are almost always fraught with ambivalence. The American Agenda 

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The phenomenon known as American exceptionalism is often identified with nativist tendencies in American civic life dating back to the Puritans. In the nineteenth century, “American exceptionalism held that the United States was possessed of a sacred mission to bring the Protestant, democratic institutions and the system of free capitalism to all of the regions of North America, and beyond.”17 In a broader sense, however, the term encompasses other, not quite so nefarious theories of American cultural uniqueness and difference from Europe, including those developed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other writers of the American renaissance, and later by American pragmatist philosophers like William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey.18 During the cold war, the anticommunism of the McCarthyist right and the emerging counterculture of the beat generation are both exceptionalist in spirit. John Lardas argues, convincingly to my mind, that “the perspective from which the Beats should be evaluated is from within the myth of American exceptionalism. Their aversion to dominant markers of American might was not outright rejection of the American way of life but a reconfiguration of its content.”19 Following Lardas, we can find currents of exceptionalism among postwar novelists and poets (Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Charles Olson, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara), in abstract expressionist painting, and in the music of John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Duke Ellington. The field of American studies, not coincidentally, also acquires its modern configuration during the cold war period, and is founded on the presupposition of the uniqueness of the United States with respect to other Western nations.20 The assimilative capacity of U.S. cultural nationalism during the cold war period might provoke a certain uneasiness, given the likelihood that the cultural other will be distorted, homogenized, or transformed into some form of multiculturalist kitsch by the powerful and clumsy cultural dynamic of the United States. Left-wing or alternative forms of exceptionalism do not necessarily escape the self-congratulation and cultural narcissism implicit in the larger phenomenon. Remaining closed to outside influences is not desirable, of course, but the celebra28 

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tion of the American hunger for representations of cultural otherness can be merely self-serving. My own approach is to situate American exceptionalism in its historical context and to subject it to a sympathetic but skeptical critical reading. Although I find the reception of Lorca in the United States to be fraught with problems, a simple condemnation of the colonialist impulse within postwar American culture is too blunt an instrument. The first paradox that must be explained is how a poet like Lorca can be assimilated into a peculiarly American project. The problem is not merely that Lorca is a foreign poet, but that he has been strongly identified with another ideology of national exceptionalism. For Spaniards and non-Spaniards alike, Lorca has traditionally represented the peculiarity, the essential uniqueness of Spanish culture. In his introduction to Langston Hughes’s version of the Gypsy Ballads, Robert H. Glauber articulates this widely shared perspective: “Lorca’s literary output is a microcosm of Spanish history, thought and behavior. He was an observer whose ethnic instincts were developed to a prodigious degree. In him, the Spanish racial memory found its perfect spokesman.”21 We can infer that Glauber wanted to draw a parallel between Lorca and Langston Hughes as “ethnic” or “racial” poets. This appeal to biological essences is embarrassingly dated, but it cannot be attributed to Glauber’s nationality. Writing from Franco’s Spain, Dámaso Alonso, the preeminent literary scholar of his time and a onetime friend of Lorca, arrives at an almost identical conclusion—Lorca, like Goya and other emblematic figures, represents a volcanic eruption of the quintessence of Spanish culture: “His is the torrential genius of Spain which bursts forth from time to time, producing strange contorted beings, visionaries whose power of expression in national as well as universal terms reaches the highest conceivable peak.”22 My intuition is that Lorca’s embodiment of Spanish cultural exceptionalism, far from being an obstacle, made him all the more useful to American poets. In the first place, he could satisfy the American hunger for cultural difference in way that a poet from a less exotic locale—Belgium, say—could not. At the same time, Spanish cultural nationalism The American Agenda 

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could provide an implicit model for an alternative construction of American culture. Ralph Ellison concludes his essay on flamenco with the statement that “Americans have long found in Spanish culture a clarifying perspective on their own.”23 The insight is a crucial one, though unfortunately Ellison does not provide additional examples; he might have been thinking of Washington Irving’s Tales from the Alhambra or of Longfellow’s interest in Spanish literature. Like Spain, the United States can be seen as a nation on the margins of European culture, with its own vernacular traditions and fiercely independent national character. Even the contrasts between American and Spanish myths of national identity are usefully symmetrical. Both nations are held to be “barbaric,” Spain in its primitivist oldness and the United States in its aboriginal newness (Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”). Both myths of national character also emphasize extreme individualism, although with opposite results in the political sphere: freedom and democracy, in the case of the United States, and recalcitrance to industrial modernity and democratic institutions, in Spain. The Protestant Puritanism of the United States functions as the photographic negative of Spain’s intense Catholicism, while Spanish America, colonized by Spain rather than by England, represents an alternative historical destiny, one that the United States might have followed under different circumstances. American readers have inevitably found that Lorca’s work confirmed their conventional ideas about Spanish culture, derived from nineteenth-century romantic archetypes and, more immediately, from the fiction and travel writing of Ernest Hemingway. The poems Lorca wrote in New York, however, provided a bridge between this archetypically Spanish poet and the foundational myths of American culture. Lorca’s “Ode to Walt Whitman” was especially significant, since Whitman, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, was a proponent of the doctrine of U.S. cultural exceptionalism and, for this reason, a crucial precursor of American poetry of the postwar period. New York itself represented the height of North American capitalism and the urban culture of the Jazz Age. Lorca might have been a significant figure within American culture even without having written Poet in New York, but this book effectively closed the deal. 30 

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The convergence of two powerful myths of national uniqueness created the climate in which Lorca could become an emblematic figure in the United States.24 Ideas of cultural uniqueness and national destiny are themselves the product of nineteenth-century romanticism, and the most striking element in American Lorquismo is its unapologetically romantic enthusiasm. Lorca appeals to multiple constituencies: he is demotic, folkoric, primitive, and telluric. As a demotic figure, a man of the people, Lorca represents a politically progressive image in tune with a certain segment of the American left. His interest in the folkore native to a particular soil anticipates the interests of American enthusiasts of folk traditions. Lorca is also seen as a primitive poet, in touch with primordial, telluric forces, and thus a shamanic, almost religious, figure. The romantic myth is hagiographic: it leaves little room for any criticism of Lorca, any sense that he might be a problematic or selfcontradictory figure, or even that some of his works might be more aesthetically accomplished than others. A synthetic perspective brings into harmony aspects of Lorca’s work that, in a more critical view, would be treated as productive tensions if not contradictions. This is not to say that the American reception of Lorca is lacking in complexity, but it is a complexity of another sort, involving the negotiation of peculiarly American issues of identity rather than a critical scrutiny of such contradictions within Lorca’s work. As we will see below, even when these internal contradictions are quite evident, American poets are often willfully blind to them. The response to Lorca among American poets invokes cold war themes with surpising frequency. I will discuss examples by Bob Kaufman and Allen Ginsberg below. The essay-poem “Lover of Lorca,” by the Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky, is also a relevant piece of the puzzle. Voznesensky traveled to the United States with some frequency in the 1960s and wrote about Greenwich Village, beatniks, motorcyles, and bongo drums. His poetry, translated by the Finnish-American poet Anselm Hollo in 1964, is redolent of the American counterculture during the period in which Lorca became a cultural icon. It is fitting that his Selected Poems was brought out by Grove Press, the publisher The American Agenda 

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of the Belitt translation of The Poet in New York and of The New American Poetry. The speaker of Voznesensky’s poem emotes about Lorca in a way very similar to many American poets of this period: “I love Lorca. I love his name, hovering lightly like a boat, humming like a gallery in a theater, vibrating with the sensitivity of the moon-disk of a radio relay station; smelling as bitter and intense as orange rind. / Lorca!”25 Voznesensky goes on to milk Lorca’s death for its political resonance: “Franco’s men killed him on the 18th of August, 1936. The murderers.”26 The Soviet poet’s homage to Lorca is not dissimilar to those of American poets like Ginsberg or Duncan. Hollo singles out this poem for praise in his introduction, pointing to Lorca (“the visionary clarity and sharpness of his images”) as a major influence.27 Robert Creeley, however, wrote a negative review of The Selected Poems, comparing Voznesensky unfavorably to the Spanish poet. Not coincidentally, Creeley chooses a favorite Lorca poem of other American poets like Ginsberg, Duncan, and Wright: Comparisons are deceptive, but Lorca’s use of America does make clear what Voznesensky’s tends to make bland. In “Ode to Walt Whitman,” for example, a language specific to the literal feeling occurs, and the revulsion felt by Lorca, in the pain of his experience, is explicit: “Agony, agony, dream, ferment and dream. / Such is the world, my friend, agony, agony. / Corpses are decomposing under the clocks of cities; / war passes with a million grey rats weeping, / the rich give to their mistresses / small illuminated moribunds, / and life is not noble, nor good, nor sacred. . . .” Against this, Voznesensky’s response reads weakly: . . . Under the firehose spouting out endless driveways my ears were turning like windmills O godless gasoline poisonous America Coca-Cola and tolling bells . . . 28

Like both Kaufman and Ginsberg, Creeley uses Lorca to stake out a position toward the cold war cultural rivalry with the Soviets: he welcomes Lorca’s anguished vision of New York, as many other poets in 32 

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the United States do, but he rejects the unsubtlety of the Russian poet’s vision of “poisonous America.” II. Lorca in Black and White

During the postwar period, both African American and gay male poets invoke Lorca in order to define their own versions of American exceptionalism, versions that are both exceptional and highly representative of a broader cultural dynamic of the period. What is particularly relevant here is the way in which poets from these two subcategories invoke cold war themes in the process of affirming their own cultural identity. Two poems from Poet in New York, “Norm and Paradise of the Blacks” and “The King of Harlem,” have strongly resonated with African American poets. (The title of this first poem refers to Small’s Jazz Paradise, a club that Lorca frequented during his sojourn in New York.) Nevertheless, the appeal of the “Black Lorca” to white poets cannot be discounted either, since African American experience was crucial to American self-definition of this period, in both popular and elite culture. Bebop became the preferred music of alienated white intellec­ tuals, and successive generations of white teenagers, beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the present, have adopted modes of speech and personal style with their origins in black culture: the hipsters of the 1940s and 1950s are the direct ancestors of the hippies of the late 1960s. In 1957, Norman Mailer expounded his view of the “White Negro”: “The hipster had absorbed the existential synapses of the negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white negro.”29 Frank O’Hara, in his “Answer to Voznesensky and Evtushenko,” could write “I consider myself to be black and you not even part.”30 Like Creeley, he rejects what he feels is the crudity of the Soviet view of American culture, which ignores its racial hybridity. In 1956, at the height of the cold war, the U.S. State Department began to send both black and white jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman, on goodwill tours abroad, as cultural embassadors for the principles of freedom, individuality, and democracy supposedly embodied by this music.31 The theory was that the improvisation of jazz musicians, each The American Agenda 

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with his or her own distinctive voice within the larger group, exemplified a uniquely American form of cultural expression, the presumptive antithesis of collectivist Soviet communism.32 The irony, which was not lost on the musicians themselves, was that African Americans represented ideals of American freedom and racial tolerance abroad while remaining subject to discrimination at home.33 Jazz was key for both black and white writers of the postwar period in the formation of new forms of American cultural exceptionalism. The State Department’s jazz tours made savvy use of some significant internal tensions within American culture: while the conservative mainstream culture of the 1950s pretended to despise hipsters and beatniks, abstract expressionism (“My kid could paint that!”), and other manifestions of the cultural avant-garde, the political and culture elite recognized that this alternative culture was more vital and dynamic. While the State Department sent jazz musicians abroad, the CIA promoted abstract expressionism—more covertly, but for identical motives.34 The similarity between Lorca’s treatment of the gypsies in Gypsy Ballads and Poem of the Deep Song and his vision of African Americans in Poet in New York is a critical cliché on both sides of the Atlantic. (I first heard this idea in a class taught by the Spanish poet José Luis Cano, a friend of Lorca himself, in 1980.) What has made this analogy especially convincing is the exceptional role that both groups play in the cultural exceptionalism of their respective nations. Despite their social marginality (or perhaps because of this marginal status) these two racial minorities play a significant role in the foreign projections of their respective cultures, especially in the musical arena. Spain has exported flamenco to the rest of the world, just as the United States has exported jazz and blues. The conventional notion is that flamenco singers and dancers express the soulful essence of Spain, in the same way that equally soulful black musicians embody a peculiarly (African) American essence. One writer who made note of this analogy was Ralph Ellison: “The gypsies, like the slaves, are an outcast though undefeated people who 34 

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have never lost their awareness of the physical source of man’s most spiritual moments; even their Christ is a man who suffered and bled before his apotheosis. In its more worldy phases the flamenco voice resembles the blues voice, which mocks the despair stated explicitly in the lyric.”35 Although Ellison does not happen to mention Lorca in his essay on flamenco, this insight is very typical of the moment in American culture in which Lorca became a key figure. As Miles Davis’s biographer John Szwed points out, Spanish culture was everywhere in the air in the late 1950s, from bullfighter posters in Greenwich Village apartments to the continuing buzz around Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. Federico García Lorca’s poetry had been translated by Langston Hughes, and García Lorca’s essays on the folklore of southern Spain resonated with the 1950s craze for Spanish guitar and flamenco dancing. (Miles, like Charlie Parker and many other jazz musicians, was a great fan of Andrés Segovia, the classical guitarist whose recording brought Spanish music to a broad audience in the United States and Europe.) It was García Lorca who first took the composer Manuel de Falla to hear folksongs that the composer later worked into his ballet The Three Cornered Hat (and from which Gil Evans in turn borrowed for his “Blues for Pablo”). And it was the poet’s essays on deep song (cante jondo) that fed the widespread belief that in some way, Gypsy songs could be equated with the blues.36

Szwed goes on to note that Kenneth Tynan attributed the Lorquian duende to Miles in 1962—“[a]s if on cue.”37 It could be argued that Miles, like Lorca himself, is one of those iconic figures by which a culture measures and defines itself. The connection between the jazz trumpeter and Lorca is an indirect one, but the biographer’s plausible suggestion that Miles Davis could have been reading Lorca around the time he recorded Sketches of Spain allows us to see the way in which American culture used Spain to define its own identity during the cold war period. In his essay “Cante Moro,” originally given as a lecture at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the African American poet The American Agenda 

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Nathaniel Mackey further explores the connection between Lorca’s fla­ menco connection (the duende), contemporary American poetry (Dun­ can, Spicer, Baraka, Kaufman), and jazz (John Coltrane). To attribute the duende to Coltrane, as Mackey does, is as insightful as it is expectable. The tenor saxophonist can be heard playing on Miles Davis’s “Flamenco Sketches” (on Kind of Blue, regarded by many as the greatest jazz album of all time) and on his own Spanish-tinged Olé Coltrane (1961). Coltrane, in fact, ultimately went further than Miles himself in forging bonds between American jazz and what later would become known as “World Music.” For a poet like Mackey, steeped in both jazz and The New American Poetry, Lorca provides the third point of the tri­ angle, the Spanish equivalent of American (and African American) cul­ tural exceptionalism. Both Szwed and Mackey mention Langston Hughes as the first significant African American poet to take an interest in Lorca. Hughes translated both Bodas de sangre [Blood wedding] and Romancero gitano, and selected Leroi Jones’s “Lines to Garcia [sic] Lorca” for the 1964 anthology New Negro Poets U.S.A.38 This poem by Jones (now known as Amiri Baraka) demonstrates the inherent difficulty of imitating Lorca’s poetry in a contemporary American context. The text begins with a political exhortation: Send soldiers to kill you again, Garcia [sic]. Send them to quell my escape. These things mean nothing. You are dying again, Garcia [sic]. This is all I remember. Send soldiers again, Garcia [sic]. Hail Mary, Holy mother, Pray for me.

The tone of the poem shifts in subsequent stanzas, however, into a perfunctory imitation of Lorca’s surrealist mode: Mandolins grow on the high slopes And orange-robed monks collect songs 36 

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Just beyond the last line of fruit trees. Naked girls pretend they are butterflies, And a deer tells stories to the twilight.39

In my judgment, at least, the intensity of the opening exhortation dissipates in a watered-down surrealism reminiscent of the excesses of the exclusively white deep image movement. The last two lines of the passage I have quoted here are particularly weak. While this poem is symptomatic of a wider African American response to Lorca, it is too derivative to be representative of Baraka’s poetry at its strongest. In any case, the poem belongs more to the earlier, “beatnik” phase of Baraka’s work than to his black nationalist period, and Baraka himself never reprinted this poem: possibly he did not find it convincing himself. Aside from Langston Hughes himself, the beat generation poet Bob Kaufman (1925–86) was probably the African American poet most heavily invested in Lorca’s work. As Maria Damon points out, Kaufman is an emblematic figure of his time, despite being much less famous than white beats like Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg: His work exemplifies a mélange of many of the cultural trends of the American 1950s and 1960s: the “individualism versus groupism” model for understanding social dynamics prevalent in the era of McCarthy and the Beats; the popularizing of European modernist developments such as surrealism and existential philosophy; and the blending of these European influences with African-American themes and structures. A quintessential subcultural poet, Kaufman is at once multiply marginal and properly paradigmatic; embodying the mainstream trends and stereotypes of his era, his work is at once high-cultural and streetwise.40

This astute contextualization of Kaufman within the cultural dynamic of the cold war period complements my argument about the forms of American exceptionalism that took shape during this period. Following Damon’s logic, we can see Kaufman’s turn to Lorca as exemplary both of the widespread interest in the Spanish poet among American readers generally, and of the subcultural versions of Lorca arising out of the African American cultural experience. The American Agenda 

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Kaufman’s poetry evokes Lorca quite frequently. In “THE NIGHT THAT LORCA COMES,” he envisions the Spanish poet as a messianic figure, leading blacks out of oppression in the South: THE NIGHT THAT LORCA COMES SHALL BE A STRANGE NIGHT IN THE SOUTH, IT SHALL BE THE TIME WHEN NEGROES LEAVE THE SOUTH FOREVER41

Kaufman constructs an American genealogy for Lorca, associating him with Crispus Attucks, an African American man killed in the Boston Massacre at the onset of the American Revolution: “CRISPUS ATTUCKS SHALL ARRIVE WITH THE BOSTON / COMMONS.” Aside from the invocation of Lorca’s name, the main connection with Lorca’s poetry is the phrase “THE CRACKLING BLUENESS,” which Kaufman has taken from the Ben Belitt translation of “Norm and Paradise of the Blacks.” Kaufman’s most significant engagement with Lorca is in the sevenpage prose-poem “The Ancient Rain,” where the phrase “the crackling blueness” reappears at a crucial juncture. As in “THE NIGHT THAT LORCA COMES,” Kaufman situates the Spanish poet in an American context, evoking iconic names like Lincoln, Washington, Grant, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Crispus Attucks (again), and John Brown. These traditional symbols of American freedom stand in contrast to representatives of racism (General Custer, Robert E. Lee, the Ku Klux Klan) and to U.S. citizens accused of spying for the communists: Crispus Attucks will never fight for Russia. That cannot be said of the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers. Crispus Attucks lives in heaven with Nathan Hale. They go to the same school. They do not live in the South.42

The tone of this passage is difficult to pin down. On the surface, Kaufman’s patriotic view of American history is not inconsistent with 38 

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cold war anticommunism that executed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, but it is hard to imagine Kaufman being sympathetic to McCarthyism. The evocation of an afterlife where Attucks and Nathan Hale (another famous American spy) can attend integrated schools reflects a kind of deadpan humor. Kaufman’s reinterpretation of the clichés of American patriotism has some ironic touches, but his admiration for Attucks, in particular, is wholly sincere. “The Ancient Rain” culminates with an invocation of Lorca, beginning with a passage written out as verse: Federico Garcia [sic] Lorca wrote Black Man, Black Man, Black Man For the mole and the water jet Stay out of the cleft. Seek out the great sun Of the center. The great sun gliding over dryads. The sun that undoes all the numbers, Yet never crossed over a dream.43

This passage is a paraphrase of Ben Belitt’s translation of Lorca’s “The King of Harlem”: To the left and to the right, southward, northward looms up the impossible wall for the mole and the water-jet. Black man, never search in its cleft the immemorial mask. Seek out the great sun of the center, be the hum in the cluster. Sun gliding through the groves with no expectation of dryads, sun that undoes all the numbers, yet never crossed over a dream44 The American Agenda 

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On the final page of the poem, Kaufman switches back to prose, identifying his own experience with that of Lorca: His poem of solitude walking around Columbia. My first day in crackling blueness, I walked off my ship and rode the subway to Manhattan to visit Grant’s tomb and I thought because Lorca said he would let his hair grow long someday crackling blueness would cause my hair to grow long. I decided to move deeper into crackling blueness.45

“I’ll let my hair grow long” is Belitt’s translation of Lorca’s “Dejaré crecer mis cabellos,” a line from the first poem of The Poet in New York.46 The autobiographical subject’s intense identification with Lorca’s “crackling blueness” makes him distrust the misreading of Lorca by those who cannot share his experience: “I observed those who read him who were not Negroes and listened to all their misinterpretations of him. I thought of those who had been around him, those who were not Negro and were not in the crackling blueness.”47 Needless to say, Kaufman’s appropriation of Lorca for his own version of (African) American nationalism could also be seen as a “misinterpretation,” or at the very least, as a highly personal appropriation of Lorca’s poetry. What does Lorca have to do with Crispus Attucks or Ulysses S. Grant, or, for that matter, with Kaufman himself ? While disqualifying other interpretations, Kaufman does not himself attempt an accurate view of Lorca: his poems, rather, enact creative misreadings of a few brief passages from two or three texts from Poet in New York. In this context, it is not particularly important to determine what Lorca himself might have meant by the phrase “el azul crujiente” in “Norma y paraíso de los negros”: the American poet has made Lorca’s phrase (or, more accurately, Belitt’s translation of Lorca’s phrase) distinctively his own. For Kaufman “the crackling blueness” denotes a state of altered consciousness that facilicates his own prophetic vision of American history. A version of African American cultural nationalism that took into account the more problematic nature of Lorca’s evocations of Afri40 

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can Americans would probably be too much to ask. Like their white counterparts, black poets have tended to celebrate Lorca rather than scrutinizing his work analytically. I myself see Lorca as a European poet looking at the blacks in New York through a primitivist lens. His vision of African American life was based on very limited observation and was filtered through typically Western ideas about Africa. Eliding many centuries of history, Lorca treats African Americans in New York as though they were “noble savages” directly transplanted from the jungles of Africa to the streets of New York—primitives ill at ease in an urban environment. Lorca’s treatment of the gypsies, of course, is tinged with an equally problematic orientalism. Nevertheless, my own ideological critique of Lorca’s racial attitudes—were I to develop it further including all the nuances and ambivalencies dear to the academic critic—would not be particularly relevant to the African American poets who drew inspiration from his work. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic have consistently given Lorca the benefit of the doubt, exempting him from the kind of “politically correct” critique that became fashionable in the U.S. academy in the 1980s. The hagiographic vision of Lorca, prevalent in the United States among both white and black poets, does not leave room for even mildly negative views. III. Lorca and Whitman: Gay Male Responses

For gay male poets, Lorca’s “Ode to Walt Whitman” plays an equivalent role to that of “The King of Harlem” and “Norm and Paradise of the Blacks” for African Americans of the same period. Lorca’s poem includes a notorious contrast between the sexual purity of the Good Gray Poet and the sexual corruption of the maricas de todo el mundo [fairies of the entire world]. Despite this problematic attack, gay poets have identified with this poem: the vicious language condemning the maricas could be understood (as it was among many scholarly readers) as an attack on impure elements within the gay community rather than on this community itself. Since Lorca was himself gay, the reasoning went, he could not have been attacking the core of his own identity. The American Agenda 

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Is my reading of “Ode to Walt Whitman” historically irrelevant to the culture of the postwar period, just like my understanding of Lorca’s primitivism in his representation of the blacks of Harlem? The two situations are not identical: if Lorca had launched a stinging jeremiad against “negros de todo el mundo,” he could not have become a hero to African American poets. In “Ode to Walt Whitman,” however, he writes explicitly in defense of the closet, refusing to denounce those who suffer their sexual marginalization in silence: Por eso no levanto mi voz, viejo Walt Whitman, contra el niño que escribe nombre de niña en su almohada, ni contra el muchacho que se vista de novia en la oscuridad del ropero •  •  •

That’s why I don’t raise my voice, old Walt Whitman, against the little boy who writes the name of a girl on his pillow, or against the young man who dresses as a bride in the darkness of the wardrobe48

He saves his venom for those who are “openly gay,” to use an anachronistic but apt phrase: those who claim group identity and point to Whitman as one of their own. Since gay American poets of the 1950s also had to negotiate their own way out of the closet, they identified with Lorca’s predicament, sharing part of his self-loathing. At the same time, in pointing at Lorca and Whitman as models for their own identity politics, they are repeating the gesture that the speaker of Lorca’s poem condemns: “Los maricas, Walt Whitman, te señalan” [The faggots, Walt Whitman, point you out].49 What bothered Lorca (if we read his ode as a reflection of his own position) is the identification of Whitman as “one of us.”50 Yet that was exactly what made Lorca attractive to young gay poets in the 1940s and 1950s: he, too, was gay. Lorca’s poem, of course, also “points out” Whitman as a hypermasculine but chaste precursor of a desired sexual identity, one which stands in contrast to the presumed effeminacy of the maricas. The problem is that such dis42 

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tinctions ultimately collapse in the face of a homophobia that would condemn any and all homoeroticism as promiscuous and effeminate. Walt Whitman, a figure whose particular brand of American cultural exceptionalism was heavily tinged with homoeroticism, was such a powerful model for gay poets of the postwar period that the prevalent reading of the poem was to either ignore or explain away the explicitly negative perspective toward this group in Lorca’s poem. Allen Ginsberg simply glosses over the problem in one of his best and best-known poems, “A Supermarket in California,” dated “Berkeley, 1955.” Most of the poem develops a dreamlike vision of Whitman, “childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.” Before he sees Whitman, however, the speaker catches a glimpse of Lorca himself: What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?51

Ginsberg’s note to this poem quotes these lines from his own adaptation of Lorca’s “Ode to Walt Whitman”: Not for one moment, old beautiful Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies nor your corduroy shoulder worn down by the moon . . . who in mountains of coal, posters and railroads, dreamed of being a river and sleeping like a river with whatever comrade would lay on your breast the little pain of an ignorant leopard.52

There is a subtle shift in Ginsberg’s retranslation of this passage: “aquel camarada” [that comrade] becomes “whatever comrade,” implying a degree of promiscuity alien to Lorca’s poem. In any case this is a very short selection of the entire poem, one that presents a lyrical vision of Whitman’s love of his “comrades” while ignoring the imprecation against the “maricas.” The American Agenda 

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In the poem “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” dated Paris, 1957, Ginsberg associates Lorca with the cold war and his own version of American exceptionalism: Poet is Priest Money has reckoned the soul of America Congress has broken thru to the precipice of Eternity the President built a War machine which will vomit and rear up Russia out of Kansas The American Century betrayed by a mad Senate which no longer sleeps with its wife Franco has murdered Lorca the fairy son of Whitman just as Mayakovsky commited suicide to avoid Russia Hart Crane distinguished Platonist committed suicide to cave in the wrong America53

Ginsberg’s evocation of Lorca is quite similar to that of Bob Kaufman’s use of American heroes (Washington, Attucks) in the context of cold war McCarthyism. Ginsberg’s “American Senate” is that of Joe McCarthy: the twin suicides of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Hart Crane reflect symmetrical tragedies of the Soviet Union and the United States—Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930 and Crane leapt into the ocean in 1932.54 Lorca, who railed against “faeries” in his “Oda a Walt Whitman”—that is, in fact, the English word he uses in his notorious catalogue of synonyms for maricas—is now “the fairy son of Whitman,” the Spanish counterpart to Hart Crane (another gay poet) and to Mayakovsky, another victim of political violence—if we attribute his suicide to his increasing frustration with Stalinism. Both Whitman and Crane are epic poets in the exceptionalist tradition: The Bridge is Crane’s attempt to write a long American poem to match Whitman’s nineteenth-century achievement. Frank O’Hara, another gay admirer of both Lorca and Mayakovsky, and a friend to Ginsberg, completes this network of associations with his famous quip: “And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.”55 44 

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Other gay poets of this period were also aware of Lorca’s “Ode to Walt Whitman.”56 As we shall see in chapter 5, Jack Spicer translates it in After Lorca. Robert Duncan quotes from it in his essay on Whitman and in a fairly long section of his introduction to Ceasar’s Gate bearing the subheading “Lorca.” While Ginsberg’s interest in Lorca seems to begin and end with the ode, Duncan cites other poems from Poet in New York and even delves into Lorca’s play Yerma, with its theme of infertility. Duncan’s explanation of what Lorca’s homosexuality meant to him and his friend Jack Spicer in the late 1940s provides a unique historical window onto this period. He speaks of “Lorca’s passionate af­ firmation of Whitman’s noble longing for homosexual love, even as it is charged with a loathing for homosexual lusts and commerce, a loathing that would have decency only in the context of Lorca’s own longing for the grand union of a sexual love.”57 Duncan differs from Ginsberg in that he explores the contradictions of “Ode to Walt Whitman” rather than simply ignoring them. At one point he even identifies with the object of Lorca’s scorn: “I was, then, one of your maricas, Garcia [sic] Lorca, one of those ‘esclavos de la mujer, perras de sus tocadoras.’”58 Despite the problematic nature of such an identification, Duncan does not hesitate to invoke Lorca for the project of American gay identity: The events of history—the actual events of the Spanish Civil war and of Lorca’s life history [. . .] we took as events in a mystery that referred to Poetry, as, in turn, we took events in poems to refer to our own work in Poetry, as we read The Bridge of Hart Crane, the visionary poems of D. H. Lawrence and of Robinson Jeffers, and the POETA EN NUEVA YORK for their vatic imagination of what was truly at issue in our being “American.” Our people were a people of a dream secretly at work in the nation without, of an other [sic] nation within and below and behind and above the public identity of America; even as we felt our language to be that of a meaning striving to come into existence within the public exchange.59

The context of this passage does not make it clear who is included in the first person plural subject: all American poets? Gay male poets The American Agenda 

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specifically? In the preceding paragraph Duncan had mentioned his friend Charles Olson (a heterosexual poet), but references to “our peo­ ple” seem to point to a narrower group identity. Despite the plural pro­ nouns (we . . . our), Duncan’s response is markedly personal: if he speaks for others aside from himself they are poets belonging to his own coterie. Like many other American poets, Duncan uses Lorca to negotiate the boundaries of individual, group, and national identities, linking him to icons of American exceptionalism like Whitman and Crane. IV. Lorca and Identity

I have singled out African American and gay male responses for separate treatment because the period of Lorca’s greatest impact was one in which identity politics were beginning to develop in American culture. Not all responses to Lorca, however, are marked with explicit signs of identity. Many poets of Jewish origin have paid homage to Lorca (Ginsberg, Rothenberg, Koch, Levertov, Shapiro, Levine) but of these writers only Rothenberg makes an explicit reference to Lorca’s vision of the Jews in “Cementerio judío” [Jewish cemetery], and he does this at a relatively late date.60 The lack of explicit markers of identity in the Jewish response to Lorca means that any further commentary would be hypothetical. Nevertheless, the number of Jewish poets who responded to Lorca is quite suggestive. The American Lorca also has a gender: masculine. Even apart from the gay male response, Lorca’s influence tends to be the strongest in poetic movements dominated by men. Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry is full of aficionados of Lorca: Jones (Baraka), Ginsberg, Spicer, Duncan, O’Hara, Koch, McClure, Creeley, Blackburn. Only four of the fourty-four poets included in this landmark anthology are women. As we shall see in chapter 4, the deep image movement, in both its mainstream and avant-garde branches, is also overwhelmingly male. The literary culture that adopted Lorca as one of their own, in other words, reflected the masculine swagger of 1950s culture. Even today, male translators of Lorca outnumber their female counterparts by a huge margin. It is true that a few women, like Denise Levertov, 46 

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Hilda Morley, and Diane Wakoski, have responded to Lorca’s duende, but Lorca has never become a feminist culture hero, probably because he stands at the center of a predominantly male canon, both in Spain and the United States. Both Wakoski and Morley tend to respond to Lorca in personal and aesthetic, rather than political, terms. I hesitate to explain this difference by their gender, though: the size of the sample is too small to draw any definitive conclusions. Diane Wakoski, in “The Night Rides of My Neighbor, Lorca, That Prevent Sleep” (1969), spins out the fantasy that Lorca, riding a horse through the night, has charged her with the care of all the gold objects of the world. The poem concludes with these lines: Lorca, why are you riding around so fiercely, frightening me that the gold of the world will tarnish and disappear without my constant articulate care?61

Wakoski’s poem has a naive, childlike charm, avoiding the heavyhanded politicization of Lorca seen in Voznesensky or Ginsberg. Hilda Morley’s poem “Duende” recounts an anecdote from Lorca’s essay on the duende and then recounts an experience of seeing a “gypsy-child” sing to call upon extremity (for all of us) that noonday, that street of the hard sun62

Not all poems that evoke the duende will actually have the duende. In fact, the evocation of daimonic power signals a nagging awareness of a certain deficiency, an envy of an artistic expression felt to be more vital and authentic. In another Morley poem, “Cante Jondo” (dated 1969), the speaker longs for a form of cultural expression free from The American Agenda 

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subtlety: “It seems that I am not fit any longer / for the nuances / [. . .] I am become now / too crude for these northern / mysteries.” Her escape from northern mists, predictably, is to be found in the vibrant, barbaric culture of Southern Spain: It is the harshness of my desire that I speak with, when I speak with these castanets the hard sound of my impatience: blackness on a whitened wall, the shadow inside the brilliance which they pulse to63

Does it need to be pointed out that it is precisely the northern European perspective that deprives the South of its subtlety by converting it into a cultural caricature? The binary opposition between the northern mists and southern sun is a staple of the romantic period. Morley writes in the mode of a European traveler to Andalusia circa 1830. One recurring feature of many of the poems considered in this chapter is an emphasis on the uniqueness of personal experience. Even in overtly political contexts, each poet feels singled out, in some way, as an individual as well as an American and (sometimes) as a member of a particular group as well. Kaufman’s entry into the “crackling blueness,” Ginsberg’s vision of Whitman and Lorca in a California supermarket, Wakoski’s vigil over precious metals, and Duncan’s identification of himself as a marica have one thing in common: they all place the poetic subject front and center. Individualism, of course, is a central plank of American exceptionalism, and each of these responses might be seen as at once typical and idiosyncratic: each takes elements from a fixed reservoir of stock images associated with Lorca (horses, the moon, gypsies, duende, New York City, Whitman) but each speaks with an individual voice. This variation is all the more noteworthy given the continual recurrence of a few key texts. Taken together, “Play and Theory of the Duende,” “Ode to Walt Whitman,” and a few other 48 

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poems from Poet in New York stimulate more than half of all American responses to Lorca. V. Duende and Kitsch

I have argued in this chapter that the crucial age of the “American Lorca” is the period from about the mid-1950s until the early 1970s. Lorca has remained a very popular poet in the ensuing years, but his impact has not been as dramatic or forceful. The language poets who came of age in the 1980s (figures like Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, and Susan Howe) are the direct heirs to the New American Poetry, but they tend to reject the romantic subjectivism of a Ginsberg or a Duncan. For this reason, the language poets have not been devoted Lorquistas. While interest in Lorca continues into the 1970s and 1980s among second-generation New York School poets (Frank Lima, David Shapiro) and among the epigones of the deep image school, there are few genuinely new reconceptualizations of Lorca’s poetry after about 1970: even Lima and Shapiro developed their interest in Lorca in the 1960s.64 One sign that Lorca, or a certain idea of Lorca, had hardened into stereotype by about the end of the 1960s is the appearance of satirical treatments. Kenneth Koch’s “Some South American Poets,” published in 1969, would have been inconceivable at the beginning of the decade. (As I will argue in chapter 7, this work parodies the vogue for translation from the Spanish and the popularity of the duende.) In Gilbert Sorrentino’s 1971 novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, Sheila Henry imagines an unexciting future with her husband Lou, an untalented poet: “She would become Madame Bovary. She thought. Lou’s academic career solidly progressing, teaching courses in Contemporary American Literature, his work being published more and more widely, his criticism, his translations of Lorca (by ‘a poet in his own right’).”65 According to the narrator of the novel, Lou Henry is subject to a very typical misconception about Lorca: Later on, he would become more aware of this [his own tendency to use clichés] and attempt to disguise clichés by litanizing them, i.e., by The American Agenda 

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employing the theory that something that is rotten becomes less so as it is made formally repetitious; and also by polluting the cliché with the addition of out-of-place adjectives. This came from his misunderstanding of Lorca, and Lou was not alone in his ignorance. A National Book Award winner of recent times has achieved his reputation by conscientiously making himself into Lorca with a corncob.66

This barb takes direct aim at Robert Bly, who won this award for Light Around the Body in 1968. Huck Finn’s corncob pipe, in the novelist’s sardonic vision, is an example of ersatz americana. There may be inverse relationship between the depth and quality of interest in Lorca and the prevalence of the duende as a ubiquitous meme. Earlier and/or more idiosyncratic responses, like those of Kaufman, Creeley, O’Hara, and Spicer, were much less likely to mention the duende itself—not because these poets wanted to avoid falling into a predictable pattern, but because the duende had not yet become a cliché. Eventually, though, this concept came to be treated as synonymous and coterminous with Lorca’s entire contribution to North American poetry and poetics. The duende connotes depth, but in the American context, paradoxically, it tends to accompany superficial and brief mentions of Lorca rather than more sustained acts of attention. It has become a literary meme on the order of Marcel Proust’s petit madeleine, the one concept that readers might recognize, even if they know virtually nothing else about Lorca. The duende enters the American conversation about Lorca with the publication of Ben Belitt’s translation of Lorca’s lecture, an appendix to his 1955 translation of The Poet in New York, and spreads like a virus henceforward. 67 “Duende sightings” (or “duende citings”) are instances in which a writer invokes this concept, usually in passing, to refer to their own work or that of another writer or musician. Denise Levertov invokes the duende in a blurb on the back cover of Hilda Morley’s To Hold in My Hand: “the duende is dark within transparence,” as well as in her 1972 essay “Williams and the Duende.”68 Michael McClure attributes the duende to Jackson Pollock.69 As noted above, the British theater critic Kenneth Tynan applies it to Miles Davis, and Nathaniel 50 

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Mackey to John Coltrane. This is by no means an exhaustive list of citations: it is impossible to catalogue every instance of what is, essentially, a cliché. One exception to the tendency to treat the duende with superficial briefness is Edward Hirsch’s The Angel and the Muse: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration, which, as the title indicates, takes Lorca’s duende as a paradigm for understanding creative inspiration generally. My approach is diametrically opposed to Hirsch’s: he is one of a long line of poets to celebrate the Lorquian duende, applying it within a specifically American context, while I remain skeptical of such appropriations. My perspective is closer to Sorrentino’s than to Bly’s: I am not even convinced that we should attribute the duende to Lorca himself without making the proper qualifications. Nevertheless, Hirsch’s The Angel and the Muse, like Mackey’s shorter “Cante Moro,” has been useful for my project in two respects: as a compendium of duende citings, and as an illustration of the domestication of Lorca in the United States. Lorca identified the duende with the uniqueness of Spanish, and more particularly Andalusian, culture. What is the purpose of using a term forged in the service of another form of cultural exceptionalism to approach the work of quintessentially American figures like William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath, Miles Davis, Jackson Pollock, and Billie Holiday? Is the term universalizable, applicable across a wide spectrum of cultures? To the extent that the duende names a universal phenomenon, it loses its cultural specificity and hence its raison d’être: we could just as easily designate it with another label: inspiration, muse, angel, demon, soul, genius. For the duende to play a role in American poetics, it must remain exotic even as it is domesticated; it must remain untranslatable, even though it serves as the tutelary spirit of the American translation of Lorca. A certain degree of kitschiness is almost inherent to the American reception of Lorca, especially in its later repetitions. The duende, with its connotations of spiritual depth, is logically opposed to kitsch, defined as the secondhand and derivative evocation of great works of art. Nevertheless, American evocations of the duende are secondhand and derivative by their very nature: they are translations, imitations, of an The American Agenda 

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original model felt to be deeper and more soulful. By this definition, almost all American evocations of Lorca are kitschy to one degree or another. There is little point in decrying the cultural stereotypes invoked by American poets when they write about Lorca, if we consider that those stereotypes are the source of Lorca’s appeal in the first place. There is no way of imagining a vogue for Lorca without the propagation of the duende meme. To call a poem kitschy is, of course, to express a negative aesthetic judgment. Not all American poems dedicated to Lorca are bad, of course, but I would argue that our own aesthetic response is useful as a kind of barometer: an oversentimental homage to Lorca represents a failure of cultural imagination; a weak imitation of his style shows a lack of understanding of the sources of his poetic power. Such value judgments leave room for disagreement: another reader might find Wakoski’s poem less charming than I do, or have a higher opinion of Baraka’s “Lines for Garcia [sic] Lorca.” These judgments might entail a different set of conclusions about which American poets have responded most fully to Lorca. A suspension of aesthetic judgment, on the other hand, would leave the reader with no qualitative measure of the impact of Lorca on American poetry: although consensus is impossible, critical evaluation remains an invaluable tool. I have postponed the necessary discussion of English-language translations of Lorca to chapter 3. Here, too, aesthetics will come into play, since I will treat the quality of translation as a barometer of the overall level of cultural understanding. Adequate or even excellent translations are not sufficient to ensure an adequate response to Lorca, but deficient work in this area is almost always a symptom of a failure of communication across linguistic and national borders.

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3 Poet-Translators Langston Hughes to Paul Blackburn

The creative misreading of Lorca among American poets has a cultural, not a linguistic, cause. In my view, at least, the main issues involved have very little to do with the inherent differences between the Spanish and English languages, or even with the shortcomings of individual translators. The belief that relatively minor imperfections in a translation are serious obstacles to cross-cultural communication (or that an ideal translation would make all obstacles disappear) represents a kind of “magical thinking.” Logically, even the most perfect rendering can do nothing in and of itself to prevent readers from seeing Lorca’s poetry through an orientalist lens. While inadequate translations can perpetuate cultural misunderstandings, I prefer to see them more as a symptom than a cause. The Lorca who influences American poetry of the postwar period is, however, a poet read in translation, and this fact has far reaching implications. In the first place, translation itself might be considered as a form of apocryphal Lorquiana, “the making finally of something that Lorca did not write.”1 To read poetry in translation, in fact, is always to read words that the poet did not write—except, of course, in cases of auto translation. A corollary of this principle is that to translate poetry in verse is to write poetry or, at the very least, to make a series of poetic choices.2 Although some scholar-translators do not define themselves 53

explicitly as poets, the versions they produce will inevitably be compared to those of poet-translators: there is no clear-cut distinction to be made between the work of poets and scholars, since translators in both categories employ a wide gamut of approaches.3 While all verse translation entails the creation of a new poem, the apocryphal nature of translation becomes especially pronounced whenever the process of translation itself becomes visible, whether in demonstrably weaker versions—those that unintentionally traduce the original text—or in those that deliberately eliminate “the translator’s invisibility” through the use of modernist techniques.4 Lorca translations produced before 1970 are variable in both approach and quality, and thus offer fertile ground for the study of this particular kind of apocrypha. Despite the oft-repeated claim that Lorca’s poetry possesses a certain “clarity,” many translators have had difficulty in finding an appropriate register in English. There has been no single leader in the field—a translator universally recognized as both excellent and influential—and thus no consensus about what an acceptable translation of Lorca ought to look like. Even some expert readers of the period did not appear to differentiate strongly between translations of variable quality. Edwin Honig, for example, praised Ben Belitt’s edition of The Poet in New York as “a model of scrupulous textual work and heroic translating.”5 This is wholly at odds with my own judgment, but it is hard to dismiss Honig, since he was himself one of the more adept translators during the same period. A retrospective look at Belitt’s work reveals serious flaws, but in historical terms it cannot be denied that Belitt was influential in popularizing Lorca’s New York poetry. Instead of attempting a comprehensive evaluation of the entire corpus of Lorca translations, I have limited my discussion here to a few historically significant and influential cases.6 The decade of the 1950s is a crucial one for the entry of Lorca into the mainstream of American poetry, so I begin with Langston Hughes’s Gypsy Ballads, which he began to work on in Madrid during the Spanish civil war and published in 1951. The two translations that generated the most enthusiasm for 54 

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Lorca in this decade were both published at the halfway point, in 1955: The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, a compendium of translations by various hands, and Ben Belitt’s The Poet in New York. Paul Blackburn’s Lorca/Blackburn did not have the historical impact of these other translations, since it was published posthumously in 1979. Blackburn’s translation, however, was produced during the pivotal period of American Lorquismo and throws into relief some key issues about the practice of translation at midcentury. I. Vernacular Lorca: Langston Hughes’s Gypsy Ballads

Romancero gitano [Gypsy balladbook] is Lorca’s best-known book in the Spanish-speaking world, containing some of the poet’s most famous and most frequently translated poems. Rolfe Humphries, Carl Cobb, Robert Havard, Michael Hartnett, and Will Kirkland have all published translations of the complete work into English, while numer­ ous other translators, including Bly, Lloyd, Spender and Gili, Blackburn, Merryn Williams, William Bryant Logan, and a probably a few others as well, have given us versions of individual poems. Only a very few works of twentieth-century European poetry, like Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and The Duino Elegies, have been translated more frequently than Lorca’s Ballads.7 Lorca’s Romancero gitano presents a set of unique challenges to the English-language translator. I believe it is harder to translate, in fact, than the notoriously difficult Poeta en Nueva York. The Romancero, because of the precision of its language, leaves much less room for error than the “surrealist” conundrums of Lorca’s New York poetry. The first problem is metrical: Lorca’s verse rhythms are too strong and distinctive simply to be ignored, but there is no ready-made equivalent in English. The use of the English-language ballad stanza might produce jarring effects like this: I took her to the river believing her unwed; the fact she had a husband was something left unsaid.8 Poet-Translators: Langston Hughes to Paul Blackburn 

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Many of Lorca’s individual lines, with their internal repetitions of words and sounds, have a distinctive, memorable quality in Spanish: “Huye, luna, luna, luna,” “verde que te quiero verde,” “por el monte, monte, monte,” “noche que noche nochera.” Rolfe Humphries translates Lorca’s famous lines: “El niño la mira, mira, / el niño la está mirando” as “The child stares at the moon, / fixedly all the while,” erasing the poetic effect that Lorca achieves through repetition of the verb.9 Even lines without such repetition can be unforgiving in their strength and integrity, showing up any obviously weaker equivalent: Humphries renders “romano torso desnudo,” creditably, as “A Roman torso, naked,” but his additional comma needlessly breaks up the noun phrase.10 Punctuation, since it is a marker of rhythm, is never a trivial matter in verse. A related challenge is to maintain rhythmic and narrative momentum while doing justice to the metaphorical density of this poetry. The images flow in rapid succession, appealing to the five senses, and are of a baroque complexity in their elaboration. Lorca’s four-part analogies are particularly tricky. Take the lines: “El jinete se acercaba / tocando el tambor del llano” [The horseman was drawing near / playing the drum of the plain]. Not only is the plain, metaphorically, a drum, but the horse’s hooves become mallets or drumsticks. Will Kirkland’s version— “Closer comes the horseman / drumming on the plain”—captures the speed of the lines, but blunts the force of the metaphor by using the verb drum, which in English usage is a dead metaphor (e.g., “drumming ones fingers on the table”).11 The plain has to be a drum. Humphries realizes this, but destroys the effect with verbose, explanatory writing that interrupts the continuity of the narrative: “Rider and horse appear / With a long roll of the drum, / The great drum of the plain.12 Langston Hughes, one of the most significant poets of the Harlem Renaissance, is also one of the earliest and most accomplished translators of Lorca into English, although his Gypsy Ballads did not appear in print until 1951.13 (Like the British poet Ted Hughes, he also translated Blood Wedding.) In a short translator’s note, Hughes gives this account of the stages through which his Gypsy Ballads passed: 56 

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First translated at the “Alianza de Escritores” in Madrid during the civil war with the aid of the poets, Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altola­ guirre, and other friends of Lorca’s. Revised in New York, 1945, with the aid of Miguel Covarrubias; and in June, 1951, with the poet’s brother, Francisco García Lorca, at Columbia University. Checked with the Lloyd, Spender, Humphries, and Berea versions of certain poems, also with published French and Italian translations. Final copy, June 10, 1951.14

Although the existence of Hughes’s translation is no secret to scholars in the field, there has been no in-depth analysis of its strategies and successes. In my own judgment, The Gypsy Ballads has to be included among the best poetry that Hughes wrote. Just as Ezra Pound’s translations of Chinese poetry (Cathay) and of a section of the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer” are classics of modernism, Hughes’s Lorca translation must be considered a significant work of American poetry at midcentury. Nevertheless, the text of these translations appeared only as a chapbook of the Beloit Poetry Review and was never reprinted.15 Until the advent of the Internet, it was available only to those with access to a good university library with back issues of the Beloit Poetry Review. It was left out of the volume of Hughes’s Collected Works that included his versions of Blood Wedding and of poems by the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. The main strengths of his Gypsy Ballads are its colloquial sharpness and its musicality. Unlike many other translators (Spender, Humphries, Kirkland), Hughes does not water down Lorca’s language through redundancy or weak lexical choices.16 He achieves a vernacular quality, but without evoking any particular dialect of the spoken language. There is no identifiable African American slang or dialect, for example. He is attentive to rhythm, but avoids the singsong effects that might result from a naive use of the English ballad-stanza. He is not afraid of assonance or alliteration: “Smoky anvils are her breasts / moaning round songs.”17 “Loosely luscious ladies pass /eating sunflower seeds.”18 Hughes also excels at translating Lorca’s touchstone lines: “Fly, moon, moon, moon”; “When the night came, / that nightly comes nightly.”19 Poet-Translators: Langston Hughes to Paul Blackburn 

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“Green as I would have you green,” however, seems less satisfying: the ambiguity of Lorca’s “Verde que te quiero verde” [Green I love {want} you green] is virtually untranslatable.20 The virtues of Hughes’s method can be seen in passages likes these: Preciosa throws away her tambourine and runs off without stopping. The stud-wind pursues her with a hot sword. The sea scowls up its roar The olive trees grow pale. Flutes of forest shade sing, and the smooth gong of the snow. •  •  •

The judge, with the Civil Guards, comes through the olive groves. Slippery blood sings a silent song of serpents. Honorable Civil Guards: the same as usual— four Romans dead and five Carthaginians.21

The voice of the poet Langston Hughes can be heard in these translations. His intervention is not invisible, to use Venuti’s criterion, but neither is it overly intrusive. One area where his presence is strongly felt is in a relatively direct treatment of sexuality and violence. His “stud-wind” and “cocky angel” accentuate the implied sexual force of Lorca’s “viento-hombrón” and “ángel marchoso.”22 Where other translators blunt the force of Lorca’s violence, Hughes’s more colloquial and direct language allows it to come forward. He calls a reyerta a brawl rather than a mere dispute (9) and knows that the verb cercar means lay siege, not merely surround (29).23 As with almost any translation, it would be possible to quibble with any number of Hughes’s individual choices, but his overall approach reveals him to be a strong translator, in sympathy with Lorca’s sensual directness. 58 

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Because his Gyspy Ballads was never published by a major publisher like New Directions, Grove, or Knopf, Langston Hughes has remained a largely forgotten link in the history of North American Lorquismo. He anticipates the later interest in Lorca among subsequent generations of African American poets, including Baraka, Kaufman, and Mackey, but his work as a translator is more often mentioned than read. Modern biographers also believe that Hughes was a closeted gay man, but the gay poets interested in Lorca in the 1950s—Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg, O’Hara—would probably not have seen him in this light. Ironically, the Lorca boom of the 1950s often drew its inspiration from translations of indifferent quality rather than seeking out the work of Langston Hughes, the most prominent poet to have translated Lorca in the previous generation. II. The Selected Poems of Federico Garcêa Lorca (1955)

The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, published by New Directions in 1955, represents a selection of the best translations currently available to the editors, the poet’s brother Francisco García Lorca and the influential editor Donald M. Allen. As an editor at Grove Press, Allen was also the force behind Ben Belitt’s translation of The Poet in New York (also published in 1955) and, of course, The New American Poetry (1960). Since this latter volume helped to popularize the generation of American poets most enthused with Lorca’s work, including Creeley, Spicer, Blackburn, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Koch, and Jones (Baraka), Donald Allen would appear to be a pivotal figure in the North American adoption and adaptation of the Spanish poet on several levels. The paperback edition, published in 1961 as ND paperback 114, has sold more than 120,000 copies and never gone out of print.24 (My personal copy is from the twenty-fourth printing.) A new edition, with an introduction by W. S Merwin, one of the original translators included in the book, was published in 2005. James Laughlin’s New Directions and Barney Rosset’s Grove Press were the two most significant U.S. publishers of modernist and avant-garde literature during the Poet-Translators: Langston Hughes to Paul Blackburn 

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1950s. The simultaneous publication of collections of poetry by Lorca in these two presses marked Lorca’s definitive entry into the canon of poetry-in-translation. Of course, for this to occur Lorca had to have already been a figure of some note. It took almost two decades after his death for him to become an “overnight success”: as noted in chapter 2, New Directions had already published Edwin Honig’s Federico García Lorca in 1944, and Lorca’s Three Tragedies in 1947. The initial list of translators in The Selected Poems lists eighteen names, although some of these are represented by only a few poems each. W. S. Merwin and Edwin Honig are also amply represented, along with Lysander Kemp, who would later translate several novels by Carlos Fuentes. (The presence of a single female name, Harriet de Onís, indicates that the translation of Lorca was then, as it is now, a mostly male enterprise.) The strategy of choosing work from among the best available poet-translators made The Selected Poems a fairly good representation of Lorca’s work, considering its time of publication. If we compare any given poem translated by Onís, Kemp, Honig, or Merwin to the same poem in The Collected Poems of Federico García Lorca, edited by Christopher Maurer in 1991, we can see that the best translations in the earlier volume can still hold their own against more recent work. Where the Maurer edition has the edge, of course, is in its completeness, consistency, and scholarly rigor. The most notable weakness in The Selected Poems is the inclusion of so many poems translated by the team of the British poet Stephen Spender and the Catalan bookseller and publisher J. L. Gili. The two account for a little more than one quarter of the total number of pages in the book, taking into account several longer poems like “Oda a Walt Whitman,” “Oda al rey de Harlem,” and “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.” This might have seemed a natural choice, given that the two had previously published, in 1939, the most extensive selection of Lorca’s poetry available prior to the 1955 Selected Poems. Spender and Gili, however, often take a flat-footed, literal approach to the text while at the same time diluting the force of Lorca’s language. Both flaws can be seen in these lines from “Thamar y Amnón”: 60 

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La tierra se ofrece llena de heridas cicatrizadas o estremecida por agudos cauterios de luces blancas. •  •  •

Earth shows itself full of cicatrized wounds or shaken by acute cauteries of white lights.25

The phrase “shows itself full” simply mimics the reflexive structure of the Spanish syntax: in more idiomatic English we would probably say “the earth looks full.” Even the most literal version of the original phrase, “offers itself up,” would be an improvement. To Anglo-Saxon ears, the more “clinical” latinate cognates cicatrized and acute lack the immediacy of scarred and sharp. The word shaken is weaker than estremecidas: the verb estremecerse, from which this adjective is derived, is equivalent to the English shudder or tremble, whether from extreme pain, fear, cold, or sexual arousal. By downplaying the vernacular power of Lorca’s imagery, Spender and Gili also tend to miss the sexual undercurrent. This particular passage shows itself as a typical crib that a native speaker informant (Gili) might provide to a poet-translator (Spender), who would then refine it. In this case, perhaps, Spender simply let the crib stand. Dilution takes several related forms in the Spender-Gili translations. A symbol, trope, or rhetorical figure vanishes when translated by a more direct, nonfigurative expression. “Camborio de dura crin” for example, is translated as “An authentic Camborio.”26 The expression dura crin [hard mane] is a metonymy for the wildness and power of a horse (or lion). The word authentic, in contrast, has no such symbolic charge: it short-circuits the chain of association and domesticates the image. Another form of dilution occurs when a word with a strong sensory charge is translated with an equivalent that fails to appeal to any of the five senses. Spender and Gili translate the verb gemir [cry out, moan] with the English verb mourn, which evokes an emotional process but not a sensory one.27 Poet-Translators: Langston Hughes to Paul Blackburn 

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Spender and Gili, in contrast to Langston Hughes, soften Lorca’s characteristically violent imagery, translating “Guardias civiles borrachos / en la puerta golpeaban,” as “Drunken Civil Guards / were knocking at the door.”28 A stronger verb like pounding or banging would have been preferable. Similarly, violador should be translated as rapist or at the very least ravager, not as violator, a word with much weaker connotations in English.29 The word injured is less forceful than heridas [wounded], and the verb surround does not convey the military implications of cercar [besiege]. 30 Violent emotions, too, suffer, as when Spender and Gili demote Lorca’s angustia [anguish] to the category of mere anxiety.31 While any one instance of dilution might be appropriate in a particular translation, there is no plausible justification for the frequent or systematic weakening of Lorca’s poetry: this practice leads neither to greater fidelity to the semantic meaning or poetic values of the original, nor to greater power or acceptability in the target language. The immediacy and sensuality of Lorca’s language might have found an analogue in English-language poetic models of the modernist period, like the imagism of Pound and Williams or the vernacular mode of Langston Hughes. This was an era in which American poets were “professors of the five senses,” to borrow Lorca’s apt formulation, as well as serious students of speech rhythms. The back cover of The Selected Poems hints at this convergence: “No other European poet of the twentieth century has attracted more English-speaking translators than Lorca, whose clarity and lyricism recommend themselves to poets working in the Anglo-American vernacular.” It is precisely this vernacular quality, present in Langston Hughes, that Spender and Gili fail to exploit. Lorca’s language does not always possess clarity, of course, but even at its most obscure it has an imagistic sharpness and sensuality.32 While the Spender-Gili translations represent a missed opportunity for convergence between two branches of modernism, I have found no evidence to suggest that the dilution of Lorca’s language had a decisive impact on the reception of Lorca in the United States. Francisco García Lorca and Donald Allen could have chosen more translations from the 62 

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more vernacular Langston Hughes, and fewer from Spender and Gili, and the end result might have been very much the same. Translation is often a translucent rather than an opaque medium, in the sense that readers are able to see through a weak translation to a stronger original. In fact, most readers are realistic enough to make allowances for unsurprising qualitative gaps between original and translation, taking on faith the greater vigor of the original.33 Taken as a whole, the Selected Poems presented a sufficient number of translations, of variable quality, to excite enthusiasm for Lorca’s poetry among American readers. III. Ben Belitt: The Translator’s Ego

Ben Belitt was an American poet and translator born in 1911 who is now best known, perhaps, for his problematic translations of Neruda. The role of his 1955 Grove Press edition of The Poet in New York was a crucial one, since it brought renewed attention to Lorca’s New York poetry, which had first been brought into English, somewhat uncertainly, by Rolfe Humphries in 1940. No other complete translation of this work appeared until 1988, when Greg Simon and Stephen White came out with a far superior version. Belitt’s edition, then, stood virtually alone for more than thirty years, given that Humphries’s translation had long since become a bibliographical rarity. Belitt’s edition also included the first English-language translation of “Juego y teoría del duende,” which Belitt translated as “The Duende: Theory and Divertissement.”34 This marks the precise point at which the duende itself enters the English-language conversation about Lorca’s poetry. It is curious to consider that English-language readers of Lorca managed to do very well without the duende between 1937, the year of Lloyd’s Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter, and 1955. Edwin Honig does not mention the lecture at all in his 1944 study of Lorca—the first book on the Spanish poet published in the United States, and the first guidebook in English. Francisco García Lorca does not invoke the duende in his introduction to the Selected Poems, nor does Ángel del Río, introducing Belitt’s own translation.35 Belitt himself could not have realized how much the translation of this Poet-Translators: Langston Hughes to Paul Blackburn 

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essay would transform the reception of Lorca in the United States. If Lorca without the duende was already a focus of intense interest in the United States, the duende would later become the principal vehicle by which enthusiasm for Lorca would spread from poet to poet. The success of Belitt’s edition of The Poet in New York presents a paradox, given the problematic nature of this translator’s practice. His creative translation, a carryover of certain features of his own poetic style as a “poet in his own right” (to use the stock phrase), produces a peculiar strain of apocryphal Lorca. The poems he translates are Lorca’s, of course, but the translation has the effect of effacing and obscuring an already difficult text. Belitt’s infractions include verbosity, ennoblement, awkward syntax and punctuation, outright obfuscation, the erasure of poetic devices like metonymy and syntactic parallelism, wildly inappropriate shifts of register and tone, inexplicable lexical choices, and the dilution of metaphors and sensory images. In the interest of concision I will look at only a few instances of Belitt’s characteristic mode of translation—a small but representative selection of the multiple abuses that I have found. My own bracketed translations are not the “correct” translations that Belitt should have used, but explanations of the meaning of the Spanish words and phrases in these fragments. If I were producing my own translation of the book, I might use several other strategies in addition to this explanatory literalism. Nevertheless, this method provides a kind of baseline against which to measure other versions. To complain about a translator’s punctuation might seem overly fastidious, but Belitt often breaks up a single phrase in Spanish into two or three phrases, introducing fragmentation and awkwardness where none exists in the original: Emilio en la yerta ginebra que se olvida en el vaso •  •  •

Emilio in a staling jigger of gin, in the tumbler, forgotten36 [Emilio in the stiff {lifeless} gin forgotten in the glass] •  •  •

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La mujer gorda que vuelve del revés los pulpos agonizantes •  •  •

The fat lady who turns up the cuttlefish and leaves them to die, wrong side out37 [The fat woman / who turns the dying octopi inside out]

These lines are pointlessly convoluted, introducing semantic elements not present in the original and breaking a single clause into two or three separate units. Where Lorca has a single vaso, Belitt requires both a jigger and a tumbler. Turning a cuttlefish inside out takes Belitt thirteen words, to Lorca’s six. And why is the cuttlefish substituted for the more evocative pulpo? The addition of lexical items that do not correspond to anything in the original text can have the effect of obfuscating a comparatively simple phrase: y que el mar recordó ¡de pronto! los nombres de todos sus ahogados •  •  •

and the sea could remember—so suddenly!— the rout of its drowners by name38 [and that the sea remembered, suddenly! / the names of all its drowned]

What sense of the word rout is relevant to Lorca’s image? Although Lorca’s poetry has often been called “surrealist,” the sea remembering the names of all those who have drowned in it is a straightforward conceit. These lines might remain difficult, but their literal sense is not hard to construe. Belitt does the same thing with “El nacimiento de Cristo”: Los pañales exhalan un rumor de desierto con cítaras sin cuerdas y degolladas voces. •  •  •

The swaddling clout falls in the breath of a wilderness murmur, and zithers with keyboards unstrung, and headless ones singing, are heard.39

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[The diapers {swaddling clothes} exhale a desert murmur / with unstrung zithers and beheaded voices]

Lorca’s difficulties occur at a higher level of comprehension: we know what it means for zithers to be without their strings, for example, but not necessarily what the symbolic import of this image is. Belitt’s version is difficult to follow on the literal level. Zithers have strings but not keyboards. What is the clout of a swaddling, and what could it mean for this clout to fall in the breath? Rhetorical figures and tropes also fall victim to Belitt’s creativity: No duerme nadie por el cielo. Nadie, nadie. No duerme nadie. •  •  •

No sleep in the sky: nobody, nobody. No one lies sleeping40 [Nobody sleeps in the sky. Nobody, nobody. / Nobody sleeps.]

Few poets use repetition as effectively as Lorca: here he uses the word nadie four times and repeats the phrase “No duerme nadie” at the beginning of two successive lines. Belitt feels the need to introduce as many different ways of saying the same thing as possible within the equivalent space, as though he were bored with Lorca’s repetitions. Even more serious is the erasure of metaphor in these lines: A veces las monedas en enjambres furiosas taladran y devoran abandonados niños •  •  •

Only now and again a furious rabble of coins that enter and ravage the dispossessed childhoods.41 [At times coins in furious swarms / drill and devour abandoned children]

Here Belitt changes children to the more abstract childhoods and erases Lorca’s visual image of a swarm of coins on the rampage. Lorca’s verbs, taladran and devoran, are more specific and powerful than Belitt’s enter and ravage. Since enjambre is the word used in Spanish for a swarm 66 

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of insects, Lorca is implicitly equating the coins with a flying swarm of bees, wasps, or locusts. Belitt’s use of the word rabble completely erases this metaphor, which is effective because of the similarity of size between coins and the unnamed insects. It is not even necessary to compare lines like “your spirit’s lukewarmness, that cannot construe you, still lacking you” or “Let me blubber, since now I am minded to” to the original text to know that something has gone seriously amiss.42 Although translation often aims to reach an appropriate compromise between the conflicting demands of the source text and the target audience, Belitt’s vandalistic approach to Lorca is not oriented toward either end of the spectrum. Like the dilution observed in Spender and Gili, it serves no discernible aim, since its sacrifice of accuracy does not lead to more aesthetically satisfying poetry for the English-language reader. This, of course, is my own judgment: one could always imagine a reader for whom Belitt’s translation would be a brilliantly creative approach to Lorca or a valuable experiment in experimental translation. Belitt’s approach, in fact, is quite appealing in theory, since it evokes positive values like freedom, imagination, and creativity, while condemning slavish literalism. His defense of the translator’s prerogative might be oddly compelling, were it not the preface to the “swaddling clout” of his own translation. The following appeal to epistemological doubt might be particularly attractive to critics reared on postmodernism: It is here that the true “morality” of translation may be said to reside, its real conscience: in an exploration of real temptations, real perils, real equivalences, from which the trot and the hack and the self-serving complacencies of the “accurate” way are excluded. Here, in short, the translator is at liberty to contemplate the universe of the given poem as its creator originally contemplated the universe of his given experience—not as a datum substantively present in the nature of things, but as a precarious search for exactitudes, correspondences, analogies that will mirror their model only in flashes, and which will demonstrate nothing so much as its partial knowability in the end.43 Poet-Translators: Langston Hughes to Paul Blackburn 

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The problem is that Belitt’s heady existentialist dismissal of the “trot” and the “hack” is ultimately rather simplistic. His reflections on translation, collected in Adam’s Dream, are structured around a binary opposition between imaginative recreation and the fetish of literalism. He berates Donald K. Walsh, for example, for a supposedly dull, wordfor-word approach to Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra, arguing that the position of the translator as “nobody in particular” is spectacularly uninteresting.44 Belitt is able to score some points at the expense of Walsh’s literalism, but he actually inflicts more damage by pointing out some outright “howlers” and ineffective paraphrases—instances, that is, where Walsh is insufficiently literal and, ironically, quite akin to Belitt himself. It is not particularly helpful, in any case, to conceive of translation as a choice between the extremes of slavish literality and precarious freedom: these alternatives are not, in fact, the two dominant paradigms in the history of translation of poetry into English, so framing the debate in terms of these two polar opposites is profoundly misleading.45 It is also questionable whether the subsumption of the “translator’s ego” leads, necessarily, to dull results. There is a special fascination in the process by which a translator negotiates a nuanced compromise between conflicting demands. The translator is always, in fact, someone in particular, situated in a particular time and place and possessed of given orientation toward both the source text and the target audience. He or she must make multiple decisions about how best to exploit the poetic resources of the target language and, where appropriate, the idiosnyncratic strengths of an individual poetic style: translation is almost never a simple matter of subordinating one set of interests to another. Belitt’s answer to this complex set of demands is to sacrifice any sense of fidelity to a set of idiosyncratic stylistic features. Clayton Esh­ leman applies the phrase “the translator’s ego,” borrowed from the translator Eliot Weinberger, to this method: My first experience with what I think Weinberger means by “the translator’s ego” was with Ben Belitt’s translations of García Lorca’s Poet in 68 

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New York, in 1959. Belitt appeared to be imposing his own poetic voice onto the Spanish text when, for example, he translated the last line of Lorca’s poem “La Aurora,” “como recién salidas de un naufragio de sangre” as, “as though lately escaped from a bloody disaster.” Lorca’s “shipwreck of blood,” a powerful direct image that needs no translational revision, had not only been lost but turned into English-English slang—Belitt’s “bloody,” as in “he’s a bloody good bloke,” neatly effaced Lorca’s “blood.” In the case of Belitt’s Lorca and Neruda translations, we hear the translator-poet’s own mannerisms leaking into and rendering rococo the meaning of the original texts. It is as if Belitt is colonizing the foreign terrain of these poets instead of accommodating himself to the ways in which they differ from his own poetic intentions.46

Whereas Belitt finds the “morality” of the translator in epistemological uncertainty, Eshleman argues from a more convincing ethical imperative: the need to avoid the ravages of literary colonialism. As we saw in chapter 2, American poets are quite willing to use Lorca in support of American cultural nationalism and identity politics. Belitt’s translation, however, is ultimately too eccentric in its effects to serve even this neocolonialist purpose: his use of Lorca for his own poetic project ultimately seems narcissistic. IV. Lorca/Blackburn: Modernist Translation

Unlike either Belitt or the Spender-Gili team, Paul Blackburn works explicitly to translate Lorca into the Pound-Williams tradition, exploiting the convergence between the Spanish poet’s vivid, sensual language and the concern with imagistic clarity and nuanced musicality that we might see in poets like William Carlos Williams, Lorine Niedecker, or Blackburn himself. While the posthumous publication of Lorca/ Blackburn in 1979 obviously came too late to have an impact on the American Lorca boom of the 1950s and 1960s, Blackburn’s enthusiasm for Lorca is quite typical for poets of his generation. (Like other poets studied in this book—Creeley, Bly, O’Hara, Kaufman, and Ginsberg— Blackburn was born in 1926; Spicer and Koch were a year older.) Jerome Poet-Translators: Langston Hughes to Paul Blackburn 

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Rothenberg dedicates his own translation of Lorca’s Suites to Blackburn, who is a significant translator of Troubadour poetry and the prose of Julio Cortázar as well as a poet in the tradition of the Black Mountain School. Blackburn lived in Southern France and Spain for a few years in the 1950s, and many of his own poems evoke the Spanish landscape. Lorca/Blackburn contains translations of thirty-seven poems in a bilingual format.47 Blackburn favors Lorca’s shorter, more lyrical poems, including twenty-one poems from the early Canciones. He includes a single poem from Romancero gitano (“La monja gitana,” an unusual choice), two from Diván del Tamarit, and none of the “surrealist” poems of Poet in New York. Four of the poems in this volume are not, in fact, written by Lorca, although they were included under the heading “Cantares populares” [“Popular Songs”] in the Aguilar edition of Lorca’s Obras completas from which Blackburn was working. “Los cuatro muleros” [“The Four Muleteers”], “Anda jaleo” [“Hit It!], “Los reyes de la Baraja” [“Kings in the Deck”], and “Nana de Sevilla” [“Seville Slumber Song”] are anonymous songs from the oral tradition for which the multitalented Lorca had written piano accompaniments. It is not clear whether Blackburn knew or cared that these were not Lorca poems: this distinction could easily be lost on a American reader who is not a specialist on Spanish poetry. George Economou in his “Foreward” [sic] to Lorca/Blackburn and David H. Rosenthal in his introduction do not signal the presence of this apocryphal material, so the nonspecialist reader of Blackburn’s book might never suspect that these four texts are not by Lorca: I myself did not notice until I sat down to make a list of the provenance of each poem in the book, even though I had looked through the volume several times before. Since Lorca/Blackburn was not prepared for publication by Blackburn himself, he did not have to opportunity to clarify the issue in a prologue of his own. The most visible feature of Blackburn’s translation practice is the introduction of certain graphic elements that do not correspond to anything in the original text: ampersands and arabic numerals, simplified spellings like altho or thru, additional blank spaces within lines, and 70 

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a ragged left margin. He also introduces enjambments where Lorca’s lines are end-stopped. These graphic features are characteristic of the Black Mountain School of poetry with which Blackburn was loosely affiliated. They thus serve to mark the translation as the work of a poet in a particular time and place. (Rothenberg also uses ampersands throughout his translation of the Suites, which he dedicates to Blackburn.) Another purpose of these visual markers is to distinguish the translation stylistically from the original, but without sacrificing very much in the way of semantic fidelity: the numeral 7 and the sign & are no less literal than seven and and written out as words, but they give a different appearance to the poem on the page and allow for some measure of expressiveness: in a bilingual edition, the two facing pages present a quite different visual aspect. Apart from these visual elements, Blackburn employs a combination of techniques rather than one consistent approach. At times he is quite literal, almost transliterating rather than translating. Lorca’s “Cantan las siete / doncellas” becomes “They sing / 7 donzellas.”48 Blackburn mimics Lorca’s verb-subject word order, and uses an archaic spelling of the Spanish word donzellas [damsels], while breaking the line at a different syntactic juncture. Similarly, in his translation of “Es verdad,” he maintains Lorca’s title in the original Spanish and translates the opening lines word for word: “Ay, qué trabajo me cuesta, / quererte como te quiero.” “Ai, what work it costs me /wanting you like I want you” (60–61). A more idiomatic rendering might be “Ah, how much effort it takes / to love you as I love you.” At the other end of the spectrum, Blackburn’s translation can be quite free and idiomatic, even slangy, in English. These lines “Nana de Sevilla,” combine the transliteration seen in other poems with a more colloquial approach: No tiene mare, sí; no tiene mare, no; no tiene mare, lo echó a la calle. •  •  •

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Has no mother, sí, has no mother, no, ain’t got no mother, she threw him in the street.49

Here Blackburn transliterates the words sí and no, while conveying something of the colloquial flavor of the original by omitting the subjects of the verbs—the norm in Spanish but markedly slangy in En­ glish. The Spanish original uses the Andalusian dialect mare in place of the standard madre, so perhaps “ain’t got no” in the third line of this stanza is meant as a tonal equivalent. This poem, of course, is one of the popular songs mentioned above: Lorca himself rarely if ever uses such dialect spellings in his poetry. Blackburn’s translation of the poem “Adelina de paseo” is one of the freest in the book. Here is the first stanza: La mar no tiene naranjas ni Sevilla tiene amor. Morena, qué luz de fuego Préstame tu quitasol. •  •  •

Oranges do not grow in the sea any more than there’s love in Sevilla. Dark one, the sun’s that’s hot, I’m— loan me your parasol50

Blackburn erases Lorca’s parallel structure (“La mar no tiene . . . ni Sevilla tiene”) and introduces elements extraneous to the text, thus producing a rather unwieldy paraphrase that departs from the elegant, songlike simplicity of the original. In this case, the use of paraphrase rather than the usual literalism leads to less satisfying results. In the same poem, Blackburn renders “tus palabras, pececillos” [your words, little fish] as “your words, your sinful little words,” perhaps confusing pececillos, the diminutive form of the word peces, with pecados or the English derivative peccadilloes (originally from the Spanish pecadillos). 72 

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In a few other places, Blackburn seems to have misconstrued the literal sense of the Lorca’s original. He translates “un oso panza arriba” as “a bear with a high stomach” rather than “a bear belly up,” in other words, “on its back,” as Hughes translates this phrase.51 Most of Blackburn’s departures, however, cannot be attributed to identifiable missteps in the reading of the original, but to a deliberate strategy that might be termed “modernist translation,” after Lawrence Venuti. Although he does no more than mention the Lorca translations, Venuti uses Blackburn’s extensive work on Troubadour poetry as one of his principal examples of innovative modernist translation in the Poundian tradition.52 For Venuti, modernism brought with it “new translation strategies that challenged fluency by cultivating extremely heterogeneous discourses.”53 Blackburn’s Poundian approach to translation flouts the conventional approach that seeks a sensible equilibrium between semantic fidelity and idiomatic fluency. While Blackburn is capable of combining literalism with freer approaches in the same poem, he tends to avoid the middle ground of balance or compromise. This does not mean that he is uninterested in the goals of more conventional translation: fidelity and the creation of original poetry in English. He invests effort, in fact, at both ends of the spectrum at once, through literalistic transcription and transliteration, on the one hand, and the creation of jazzed-up audiovisual textures on the other. The resulting approach might seem rather disjointed in its peculiar combination of freedom and fidelity, but this apparent inconsistency forms part of a consistently modernist approach. As was the case with Belitt, there is no clear preestablished criterion for evaluating the success of Blackburn’s efforts. Those heavily invested in the Poundian tradition of modernist translation, or in the PoundWilliams tradition in American poetry to which Blackburn belongs, are likely to render a more favorable judgment than those who place a premium on the fidelity and fluency of more conventional modes of translation. My own view (as a reader who belongs, to some degree, to both of these categories) is that Blackburn’s experimental translation Poet-Translators: Langston Hughes to Paul Blackburn 

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practice produces predictably mixed results. The high points are the colloquialism and musicality seen in the opening lines of poems like “Blackberry Bush” and “Echo”: Blackberry, with the grey stem, give me a handful of berries to eat. Blood & thorns. Closer! If you love me, I’ll love you.54 •  •  •

Dawn’s flower has already opened itself up. (Remember? the depths of the afternoon?)55

In this last case, Blackburn’s use of white spaces and indentations provides a kind of visual analogue to a musical score, as is frequent in poets of the Pound-Williams tradition.56 In my view, the ultimate justification for the poet-translator is the creation of new poetry in the target language. The disruptions of fluency that result from awkward paraphrase, awkward literalism, and mistranslation have no particular value when they do not lead to poetically satisfying results. V. Four (or Five) Degrees of Domestication

As with Belitt, the question of literary colonialism arises with Blackburn’s translations. Purists might object to the distractions of the graphic signs of difference that he introduces into his versions of Lorca’s work. There really is no way, however, of escaping the domesticating effects of translation. The term domestication refers, in the first instance, to translations that tame or dilute the force of the original in order to make it conform to domestic ideals of fluency. In the larger sense, however, domestication is the process by which a translation reflects any norm derived primarily from the target culture. All translations domesticate the source text; even a foreignizing translation, one that pursues modernist strategies of defamiliarization, answers to some 74 

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domestic agenda. In the case of Blackburn, I would argue that the principal aim is to assimilate Lorca to the ideals of Poundian translation, not to render the qualities of Lorca’s original Spanish text. This is a debatable point: in my experience, translators sometimes delude themselves into thinking that their efforts to satisfy the needs of their own target audience will bring them closer to the original. The versions of Lorca’s poetry examined here follow four separate strategies of domestication. Langston Hughes’s vernacular register contrasts with that of Spender and Gili, who offer up a fairly sedate Lorca, taming the poet’s wildness and dulling the force of his violent imagery; Ben Belitt domesticates Poeta en Nueva York by making it reflect his own stylistic eccentricity. What this diversity of approaches suggests is that the English-language literary culture into which Lorca was translated in the thirty or forty years after his death was not a monolithic one. If I had examined additional translations I might have come up with seven or eight separate strategies. Another type of domestication is the more middle-of-the-road strategy followed by Merwin, Honig, or Maurer. Apart from Jerome Rothenberg, more recent translators of Lorca have, in fact, followed this more conservative strategy. They have not attempted to reproduce Blackburn’s modernist techniques; nor have they followed the example of Ben Belitt and made radical claims for the translator’s right to reshape the text. Though it would be possible to quibble with individual choices ad infinitum, recent translations of Lorca into English have for the most part been adequate if not particularly distinguished. Given the history of Lorca translation, the pragmatic value of mere competence should not be discounted, even when the resulting translation is not poetically brilliant. Versions of Lorca’s poetry that are both reasonably accurate and acceptable to their target audience do not raise the problem of Lorquian apocrypha in the same manner as the experiments of Belitt and Blackburn. When these translations do fall short, it is usually the result of a Stephen Spender style dilution of Lorca’s powerful language, rather than of vandalism à la Belitt. Early translators of Lorca inflicted some real damage to the understanding of the Spanish poet in at least two significant respects: Poet-Translators: Langston Hughes to Paul Blackburn 

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1. The dilution of Lorca’s language at the hands of Spender and Gili made this Spanish variety of literary modernism seem alien from the sensual immediacy of poetic language in the Pound-Williams tradition. This kind of translation paved the way for the questionable arguments made later by Robert Bly, who emphasized Lorca’s difference from Anglo-American imagism. In chapter 4, I will argue that Bly’s clumsy, propagandistic translations helped to perpetuate the notion of Lorca as an anti-intellectual poet unconcerned with craft. By stripping Lorca of his precise language and resonant rhythms, Bly created a poet-in-translation more in tune with his own views of poetry. 2. Ben Belitt’s abstract and obscurantist approach to some of Lorca’s most difficult poetry erected obstacles to a fuller understanding of Lorca’s “surrealism.” An American reader wanting to have access to Lorca’s text through Belitt’s translation would have been right to complain of the obfuscatory elements that the translator has introduced: Lorca’s New York poetry is already difficult in Spanish, and Belitt introduces additional problems of comprehension, thus bequeathing an exaggerated conception of Lorca’s bizarre irrationality to subsequent generations of American poets. In both cases, the process of translation introduced spurious differences. Nevertheless, Lorca managed not only to survive Spender’s dilution and rough treatment at the hands of Belitt and Bly, but even to grow in reputation. American poets and readers of poetry in the 1950s and 1960s did not have access to scholarly reliable editions and competent translations, like those edited by Maurer in the last two decades of the twentieth century, but this did not diminish their enthusiasm. If inadequate translations could not sink Lorca, then better ones would not necessarily have made a measurable difference in his reception. Access to more accurate translations at an earlier stage in the game would probably not have impeded the creation of the romantic myth of Lorca. In fact, the romantic stereotype, embodied by the ubiquitous duende, is as dominant now as it ever was, despite the

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abundance of accurate information at the disposal of any interested English-language reader. There is a very short step from the variable strategies of domestication seen in these translation of Lorca to the apocrypha that will be the subject of the remaining chapters of this book. Whatever our assessment of the merits of Belitt and Blackburn, it is clear that their work forms part of the larger reinterpretation of Lorca undertaken by their contemporaries. Blackburn’s possibly unintentional translation of songs from the popular tradition as though they were by Lorca calls to mind the strange genesis of Creeley’s apocryphal “After Lorca.” Belitt’s insertion of his own poetic personality into his translation of The Poet in New York anticipates Jack Spicer’s appropriation of the Spanish poet to his own ends. Before turning to these examples in chapter 5, however, I will first consider the poetry of the deep image, a movement that claims to enact an American version of Lorca’s specifically Spanish poetics.

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4 The Deep Image

I. Two Deep Image Schools or One?

We might expect Lorca’s influence to be especially concentrated in the poetry of the so-called deep image, a movement that reportedly takes its inspiration directly from the Spanish poet. Nevertheless, this influence is somewhat hard to track, in part because of the confusion that still surrounds the history of the deep image movement. Paul Hoover, in the introduction to his anthology Postmodern American Poetry, describes the origins of the movement like this: The deep image, as seen in various phases of the work of Diane Wakoski, Robert Kelly, Clayton Eshleman, and Rothenberg himself, is inspired by Andalusian cante jondo, or “deep song,” surrealist-influenced Spanish poetry, including that of Federico García Lorca, and Lorca’s essay “Theory and Function of the Duende” (a Spanish word denoting ghosts and magic but in the poetic sense a deep knowledge, as of beauty and death). Strongly felt and resonant, the deep-image poem is as heroic in mood and stylized in execution as the flamenco.1

This description provides a convenient starting point for an understanding of the origins of the movement, but it also presents a few problems. In the first place, it perpetuates the widespread conflation of Lorca’s neopopularist poetry with the already dubious category of

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“Spanish surrealism.” Lorca’s Poema del cante jondo and Romancero gitano, the books that evoke the gypsy thematics, are not “surrealist,” nor does his well-known duende essay, strictly speaking, provide a theoretical basis for Spanish surrealism. In placing Lorca’s neopopularist style in the same category as his New York poetry, American readers tend to forget that Lorca went to New York, in part, to escape from his too-close identification with the gypsies. At the same time, I seriously doubt that American deep image poetry owes any discernible debt to flamenco music or to cante jondo. If the deep of the “deep image” is, as Hoover implies here, the deep of “deep song,” this does not mean that U.S. poets were listening seriously to the cante jondo itself: it is far more likely that they took their ideas about this genre from Lorca’s duende lecture rather than from a firsthand engagement with Spanish folk music.2 A more serious issue with Hoover’s account is that it leaves the unwary reader with the mistaken impression that deep image poetry enjoyed a brief moment of prominence before its very rapid disappearance in the early 1960s: “But the practice of the deep image was so short-lived and unsystematic that it cannot be fully represented as a school.”3 Actually, this was one of the most popular modes in American poetry through at least the mid-1980s. The best-known proponents of this school were Robert Bly and James Wright, two names that Hoover does not even mention in his account; numerous younger poets also wrote in a style inspired by this other branch of the deep image school. What is going on here? Hoover defines the postmodern poetry of his anthology as an alternative, experimental tradition opposed by definition to more conservative currents: “Postmodern poetry is the avant-garde poetry of our time.”4 Rothenberg and other poets of his group fit within Hoover’s particular definition of the avant-garde, while poets like Bly, Wright, Levine, and Strand, considered more mainstream poets, cannot even be mentioned. The result is a distortion of the historical record. Even Rothenberg, who was not particularly sympathetic to Bly’s subsequent appropriation of the deep the deep image 

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image, at least acknowledges Bly’s presence on the scene: “I found myself positioned between poets like Robert Kelly & Diane Wakoski, on the one hand, James Wright and Robert Bly on the other.”5 Jed Rasula also points out that Rothenberg published his own poetry and translations in Bly’s magazine The Fifties before it was renamed The Sixties.6 Work by poets like Wright, Bly, and Merwin also appeared in Rothenberg’s annual anthologies Poems from the Floating World during this period.7 In accounts by more mainstream critics, we find an inversion of Hoover’s poetic universe: Wright and Bly now take center stage, while Rothenberg and Kelly virtually disappear. James Breslin, for example, cites Kelly in passing (but not Rothenberg), while treating Bly as the most influential theorist of the movement and Wright as its major poet. Breslin, somewhat problematically, includes William Stafford and Louis Simpson in this school.8 Paul Breslin (no relation) does not mention either Stafford or Simpson in a longer list of Bly, Wright, W. S.Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Mark Strand, James Tate, and Charles Simic, among others.9 There is, then, no consensus on who the deep image poets are, even among those who agree on the centrality of Bly and Wright. While familiar to any specialist in contemporary American poetry, the deep image remains a somewhat nebulous and problematic concept.10 Jed Rasula’s 2006 essay “Deep Image” goes a long way toward explaining the confusing coexistence of two deep image schools, one a part of the postmodern avant-garde and the other a more mainstream movement. According to Rasula, the term arose in the writing of Rothenberg and Kelly and stood at the center of their activities during the early sixties; these two poets, however, moved beyond the concept fairly quickly, and did not republish their own, early deep image poetry. To read Rothenberg’s White Sun Black Sun now one must go to the rare book room of a university library.11 Bly and Wright, in contrast, were among the most highly acclaimed poets of the 1960s. Bly was an especially effective propagandist for poetry of this type, even though he has sometimes expressed his dislike of the term “deep image” itself. 80 

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Rasula claims to have identified the decisive moment in the shift of the term from Rothenberg and Kelly to Robert Bly: The conflation of this original initiative with Bly’s circle, and the source of much subsequent disinformation, can be traced to Stephen Stepanchev’s 1965 book American Poetry since 1945. By that point, Kelly and Rothenberg had adopted a retrospective posture toward the deep image, and the term began its quasi-academic afterlife where it has persisted to the present, almost invariably used with reference to Bly and James Wright.12

Stepanchev does, in fact, discuss the contributions of Kelly and Rothenberg, but he treats Wright and Bly as the major proponents of what he calls “the new subjectivism.” I find no overt disinformation in Stepanchev’s account, only a shift of emphasis to these more mainstream poets. Bly, as Rasula points out, was a diligent and successful popularizer, and promoted “Spanish surrealism” and “leaping poetry” for decades after the initial founding of the deep image school.13 Rothenberg, in contrast, went on to develop the field of ethnopoetics and showed only a sporadic interest in Spanish or Spanish American poetry until his return to Lorca in the early 1990s. The other poets of Rothenberg’s original circle, including Wakoski, Kelly, Antin, Schwe­r­ ner, and Eshleman, also moved in various directions over the subsequent years. Of these poets, only Eshleman remained closely identified with Spanish-language poetry, most notably through his translations of César Vallejo. Literary histories continue to group Black Mountain, San Francisco renaissance, beat generation, and New York School poets together in the general category of The New American Poetry, named after Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology of this title. On the other side of the line would lie various “mainstream” tendencies, including the Audenesque neoformalism of the 1940s, confessional poetry—and the deep image poetry of Bly and Wright. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, however, it seems arbitrary to maintain this line of demarcation in exactly the same place.14 Both the confessional school of Lowell the deep image 

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and Plath and the deep image poetry, in its two parallel branches, belong, arguably, to a larger revolt against the so-called academic poetry of the 1940s and 1950s and the poetic legacy of a conservative-leaning New Criticism.15 It is also somewhat arbitrary, in my view, to split deep image poetry down the middle. Rasula’s description of the impulse behind the movement neatly recombines the two halves of this movement: The Midwest of Bly and Wright converged with the metropolis of Antin and Rothenberg in a commitment to translation as recovery of an untapped potential for English language poetry, rendering in a distinctively American idiom the enigmatic volatility of the subconscious and of the pre-rational, manifested in the work of Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Georg Trakl, André Breton, and Vicente Aleixandre.16

To note this “convergence” is not necessarily to conclude that the poetic and ideological differences between Bly and Rothenberg are negligible. The point, rather, is that the relevant comparisons only become possible when all the pieces of the puzzle can be considered together. To what extent, then, is Federico García Lorca a significant source of deep image poetry of either or both of the two branches of this movement? He was clearly a significant figure for Rothenberg as he began to define his poetics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and for Robert Bly during a much longer stretch of time, but in both cases Lorca’s footprint turns out to be considerably smaller than we have been led to expect. The typical deep image poem, described by Paul Hoover as “a catalogue of self-sufficient images,” does not closely resemble Lorca’s own poetic practice, although it might borrow some imagery from him.17 What is more, since Lorca is only one of the poets who inspired deep image poetics, it is difficult to separate his impact from that of Neruda and other European and Latin American poets. In the secondary literature on deep image poetry we often find generalizations about the influence of “Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Georg Trakl, André Breton, and Vicente Aleix82 

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andre,” or “poets like Lorca, Vallejo, Machado, Guillén, Transtromer, and Trakl.” Such lists of poets are problematic in their implication that all these poets participate in some common poetic enterprise from which Anglophone poets have presumably been excluded. Such lists blur the significant differences separating the late symbolism of Jiménez and Machado from the expressionism of Trakl or the surrealism of Breton and Aleixandre.18 Many of the poets included in lists like this were indifferent or hostile to the surrealism imputed to them by implication. An unwary Anglophone reader might very well draw the false conclusion that the major Spanish-language poets on both sides of the Atlantic, from Machado to Vallejo, belong to some pan-Hispanic surrealist movement.19 II. Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly: The Invention of the Deep Image

In a brief essay explaining the concept of the deep image, Rothenberg sketches the following program: a heightened sense of the emotional contours of objects (their dark qualities, or shadows); their free re-association in a manner that would be impossible to descriptive or logical thought, but is here almost unavoidable; the sense of these objects (and the poem itself ) being informed with a heightened relevance, a quickened sense of life; the recognition of the poem as a natural structure arising at once from the act of emotive vision.20

This outline provides a good sense of the tone and flavor as well as the substance of Rothenberg’s early poetics. He advocates for a heightened or quickened emotional responsiveness that will engender a string of images connected by intuitive rather than rational links. “A Poem for the Weather,” from Rothenberg’s 1960 collection White Sun Black Sun, is a typical example of the sort of work that he was publishing during this period: the deep image 

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In the eye of my needle everything sprang into life: a dog, a town and an ocean. Roses grow tigers and someone spilled rain on my scarf. Over the moon we could hear the voice of the president, clear as a church bell, simple as ether: under the oranges, summer sat without moths.21

Although this poem bears a superficial resemblance to the poetry that James Tate and other poets would go on to write in the 1970s, it was an extremely original style for an American poet writing in 1960. As in Tate, the playfulness of the imagery offsets a certain solemnity of tone. There are a few surprising surrealist metaphors like “roses grow tigers,” but the engimatic quality of the poem derives mostly from the lack of explicit rational connections between the images, rather than from the inventiveness of each individual metaphor. In some cases, the sense of incongruity is fairly minimal: “clear as a church bell,” for example, is a very slight variation on the stock simile “clear as a bell.” White Sun Black Sun, in its attempt to create intuitive surrealist images, is closer to Poet in New York than to any other work by Lorca. It does not evoke the childlike grace of the Spanish writer’s more lyrical poems or the structural rigor of Romancero gitano. From my perspective, however, the attempt to achieve a Lorquian style remains unconvincing. Rothenberg relies too much on words like sorrow, moon, dark, death, spider, and silence to convey a somber mood. The use of words with a predetermined weight can lead to a formulaic quality. It would be easy to write a deep image poem simply by manipulating this predetermined lexicon, without the “heightened sense of the contours of objects.” The words president and America vaguely suggest a politi84 

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cal subtext of some kind, but this subtext is not articulated with any clarity. The other pitfall here is a contrived and inconsequential effect: the lines “Roses grow tigers / and someone has spilled rain unto my scarf,” for example, are not particularly convincing when compared to an emotionally charged Lorquian image like “Con todo lo que tiene cansancio sordomudo / y mariposa ahogada en el tintero” [With all the bone-tired, deaf-and-dumb things / and a butterfly drowned in an inkwell].22 There is a precision and power in Lorca’s metaphors that is too often absent in American imitations. A butterfly is of the exact size to be drowned in an inkwell. The emotional import of the line arises from the juxtaposition between the symbol of natural, ephemeral beauty and its inky demise in a man-made artifact. Rothenberg’s images, lacking such complexity, are often whimsical rather than dark or deep: one wants to ask who has spilled rain on the scarf of the speaker of this poem, and why this matters in the first place. It is not surprising, then, that Rothenberg abandoned the style of White Sun Black Sun, allowing this book to go out of print. Another poem begins like this: Mirrors cover a field where the moon is crying; under a tent of ashes the cloak of your laughter hangs from the leaves, and children follow an elephant out of your wrists.23

Novel images like “children follow an elephant out of your wrists” seem contrived rather than intuitive. Furthermore, the dissemination of surrealism in U.S. poetry in the 1960s would quickly convert the deep image into a cliché. Rothenberg, despite his essentially romantic sensibility, is an extremely savvy and self-critical intellectual who recognized the limitations of the deep image as he moved restlessly forward to the development of ethnopoetics in the mid-to-late 1960s. Robert Kelly’s “Notes on the Deep Image” is usually cited as the seminal text of the original deep image movement. This brief but theoretically dense essay is more or less an account of what Rothenberg the deep image 

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was attempting in the poems of White Sun Black Sun: Kelly’s own poetry of this period, much of which is collected in the first fifty-five pages of The Alchemist to Mercury, does not derive from Lorca or other Spanish-language sources in any way that I am able to discern. In the essay in question Kelly is mainly concerned with articulating the connection between the practice of the deep image and the prosodical concerns of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, which were centered on concepts like line and breath. This probably explains why he casts his explanation of the deep image in auditory rather than in visual terms: Basically, the fullest force is possible only by means of the successful employment of one image’s position in a context of other images; the image, after its first appearance as dark sound, still lingers as a resonance. This resonance must be controlled, and the effective means of control are the acoustics of the space intervening between one image and the next.24

This is a stirring account of how a deep image poem might move from image to image. Nevertheless, it would be hard to judge an actual deep image poem by such criteria, since the literal “acoustic space” between one image and the next would depend on the tempo and pacing of a particular performance of the poem, as well as the acoustics of the space in which the performance took place: the poem on the page is silent, and there are no conventions for translating line breaks into pauses of any fixed duration. Perhaps this reading of Kelly’s statement is too literal-minded, but a figurative reading does not clarify matters: how could one apply the theory of “dark sound” and “resonance” to the text of a poem from Rothenberg’s book? How could one measure the acoustic space between “the moon is crying” and “under a tent of ashes,” for example, in any precise or meaningful way? Kelly’s theoretical musings have very little to tell us about Lorca’s poetry. The intense concern with prosody in “Notes on the Deep Image” take as their point of departure the prosodical practices of Olson or Duncan, not those of Lorca, Vallejo, or Neruda. In a letter to 86 

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Rothenberg written in reaction to Kelly’s “Notes on the Deep Image,” Robert Creeley, another poet associated with Olson’s Black Mountain school, objected to Kelly’s treatment of poetic rhythm, fearing that the prosodical innovations of Williams, Olson, Duncan, O’Hara, and Ginsberg (and presumably Creeley himself ) would be lost in a poetics centered on the visual image.25 Whatever the differences between Kelly and the Black Mountain poets, this debate is an internal, domestic one among American poets of the early 1960s, not an effort to engage with poetry in a truly international context. It is notable, too, that Kelly cites the founder of the surrealist movement, André Breton, rather than the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca in this early theoretical essay. As far as I have been able to ascertain, neither Rothenberg nor Kelly ever propagated the idea, later popularized by Robert Bly, that “Spanish surrealism” (that is, work by Spanish-language poets influenced by surrealism but not members of the surrealist movement itself ) is deeper and more worthy of emulation than French surrealism. In Rothenberg’s Poems From the Floating World, an annual journal published between 1959 and 1963 and devoted explicitly to the deep image, David Antin’s translations of Breton outnumber the three short texts by Lorca translated by James Wright. Rothenberg himself contributes versions of Borges, Huidobro, and Neruda, but also of “Guenter Grass” and Paul Celan. During this period, Rothenberg is probably better known for his 1959 City Lights volume of translations of contempoary German poets than for his interest in Lorca or Neruda.26 Volume 3 (1961) of Poems from the Floating World bears the subtitle The Deep Image: Ancient and Modern, and contains, among other things, three T’ang dynasty poems translated by Gary Snyder, Rothenberg’s version of a poem by San Juan de la Cruz, and a poem by the American surrealist Philip Lamantia, a direct disciple of Breton. Rothenberg’s translation of the sixteenth-century mystic is the only material from the Spanish in this volume, which also contains hints of Rothenberg’s incipient fascination with archaic and tribal poetries. Rothenberg, the major force behind deep image poetics, never limited his readings to a single national or linguistic tradition. the deep image 

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The contents of Poems from the Floating World suggest that the theory and practice of the deep image, in their earliest incarnation, are not linked exclusively, or even primarily, to Spanish-language sources, despite the limited attempt to imitate Lorca in White Sun Black Sun. It is true that Rothenberg gives Lorca credit as the first poet who opened his eyes to the existence of the European avant-garde, as early as the late 1940s.27 But this does not mean that Rothenberg stopped with Lorca. Most critical accounts still attribute the origins of the deep image to Spanish-language surrealism, but a very small proportion of the material translated from the Spanish in the five volumes of Poems from the Floating World falls squarely within this (already somewhat dubious) category: there is no Vicente Aleixandre or Luis Cernuda, none of Lorca’s New York poems, and only a single poem from Neruda’s surrealist-influenced period.28 The idea that the deep image arises primarily out of translation from Spanish-language poetry in its surrealist vein, then, is a retrospective interpretation shaped by Bly’s essays and translations of the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, as we will see below, Lorca’s influence on the other branch of the deep image movement is equally difficult to pin down. III. James Wright and Robert Bly

James Wright and Robert Bly are the two poets most often associated with the rise of “Spanish surrealism” in mainstream American poetry of the early 1960s. Both styles of deep image poetry attempt to link together resonant or “dark” images, using a stock vocabulary of dark, silent, stone, moon, bone, etc. The main difference is that in the more mainstream variety the surrealist image, that is, the surprising metaphorical leap between two distant realities, is much less prevalent than expected: we must face the possibility, then, of a deep image poetry in which the deep image itself plays a surprisingly minimal role. Although many critics view James Wright (1927–80) as the major poet of the deep image, his poetry is not particularly surrealist either in its inspiration or in its execution. If one were to believe the critics, Wright is one of the poets who, in the early 1960s, took inspiration from translating surrealist poetry from the Spanish. He did in fact 88 

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translate several poems from the Spanish, but very few of these poems are, in fact, representative of “Spanish surrealism.” The Pulitzer Prize–winning 1971 Collected Poems, for example, contains versions of Spanish poets like Jiménez, Guillén, and Salinas, poets who were absolutely impervious to any surrealist influence. Wright also prefers Vallejo to the more surrealist Neruda, including only two poems from the Chilean poet in his Collected Poems. Casting aside the inaccurate notion that all poetry written in Spanish during the twentieth century is surrealist, we can infer that Wright is drawn to the lyricism of Jiménez, the jubilant, wakeful attentiveness of Guillén, and the concern with human suffering of Vallejo and Hernández—and not quite so much to the surealist-influenced style of Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra or Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, although he does praise “Ode to Walt Whitman” repeatedly in his correspondence.29 Wright’s Collected Poems does not even include his Lorca translations, which are, in any case, quite few in number. Why, then, do literary historians insist on attaching the surrealist label to Wright’s poetry? A look at a well-known and typical poem from the 1960s might clarify matters: Trying to Pray This time, I have left my body behind me, crying In its dark thorns. Still, There are good things in this world. It is dusk. It is the good darkness Of women’s hands that touch loaves. The spirit of a tree begins to move. I touch leaves. I close my eyes and think of water.30

The only truly surprising metaphor in this short poem is that of the body’s “dark thorns.” Even that image, however, falls squarely within the “people are plants” metaphor, one of the common and easily understandable cognitive mappings.31 the deep image 

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“Trying to Pray” consists mostly of short declarative statements that demand to be taken quite literally, like “I close my eyes and think of water.” It is not clear at first glance why poems written in this declarative style are often called “surrealist,” since they do not bring together disparate elements in surprising combinations (like Rothenberg’s elephants emerging from wrists). We would find similar results with many of Wright’s most celebrated poems, such as “Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me” or “Lying in a Hammock in William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.”32 One hypothesis is that there is a particular poetic tone of voice that has come to connote a “surrealist” mode to U.S. readers, even in the absence of metaphorical leaps. Wright’s poem features an estranged and naive voice who places little value on intellectual reflection or analysis, although he is given to a certain sententiousness. The poetic voice does not appear to be that of a native speaker of English: since most people do not speak exclusively in simple declarative sentences in the present tense, the simplicity of the language removes it from the colloquial register; the lexicon and syntax are reduced to the point of being unidiomatic, despite the grammatically well-formed sentences. The result is a kind of “translated” quality that is typical of much deep image poetry of the period. Rothenberg uses Pierre Reverdy’s well-known definition of the image as the epigraph to the first volume of Poems from the Floating World: “The image cannot spring from any comparison but from the bringing together of two more or less remote realities . . . The more distant and legitimate the relation between the two realities brought together, the stronger the image will be . . . the more emotive power and poetic reality it will possess.”33

Lorca’s “butterfly drowned in an inkwell” might be the perfect example of such an image: the relation is distant [lointain] in that butterflies do not often encounter inkwells in the normal course of events, but at the 90 

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same time legitimate [ juste] in the aptness and emotional power of the image. (The word apt might be better than legitimate as a translation of Reverdy’s juste.) When Wright does try for a self-consciously surrealist image, the results are not always particularly convincing: “Two athletes are dancing / In the cathedral / Of the wind” or “Small antelopes / Fall asleep in the ashes / Of the Moon.”34 To my mind, these flights of fancy do not define Wright’s style: his strength as a poet lies in his realism and his use of organic metaphors that link his biological existence to other living things, rather than in the invention of fanciful surrealist metaphors. Much the same could be said of the poems of Robert Bly from the early 1960s. Take this section from the poem “Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River”: I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota. The stubble field catches the last growth of sun. The soybeans are breathing on all sides. Old men are sitting before their houses on car seats In the small towns. I am happy, The moon rising above the turkey sheds.35

As in Wright’s “Trying to Pray,” the language tends heavily toward the literal; the preferred mode is straightforward, present tense declaration. Bly even uses the sentence “it is dusk” found in Wright’s poem “Trying to Pray.” The only metaphor in this passage is that of the soybeans “breathing,” another variation on the “people are plants” theme. The tone remains sober and solemn, making the speaker’s profession of happiness seem somewhat surprising. Among the possible stylistic antecedents for Wright’s characteristic style of the 1960s—a style shared to a large extent by Bly—Spanishlanguage “surrealism” does not loom large. I would point to a few more plausible sources: 1.  Classic Chinese poetry of the T’ang dynasty, in contemporary English translation: such translations of Chinese poetry typically feature short, imagistic lines of free verse and uncomplicated, dethe deep image 

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clarative syntax, foregoing the complex prosodic and syntactical constraints of the original texts. There is a certain “fortune cookie” tone in the Wright’s gnomic statements like “there are good things in this world.” Wright alludes to Chinese poetry in one of his best known poems, “As I Step Over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor.”36 2.  The poetry of D. H. Lawrence, with its search for organic forms and its evocation of a certain “quietness.” Lawrence’s short poem “The White Horse,” for example, could almost be mistaken for a poem by James Wright. Although this poem is not necessarily typical of Lawrence’s thousand-page poetic production, the resemblance is uncanny: The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on and the horse looks at him in silence. They are so silent they are in another world.37

Wright’s “A Blessing,” a poem in which he and a friend (Robert Bly) stop by a pasture and commune with some ponies, might be seen as a rewriting of this poem.38 Lawrence’s distrust of the civilized, rational mind also would have made him attractive to Bly and Wright. 3.  The expressionist Austrian poet Georg Trakl. Bly and Wright translated Trakl in an edition of twenty poems and prose fragments published in 1961. In this translation, at least, Trakl moves forward ponderously, in mostly short, literal sentences. His imagery is mysterious and resonant but does not link together disparate realities in the surrealist mode prefigured by Reverdy in his famous definition of the vanguardist image. These three sources—there may be others too—suggest that Wright forged his deep image style from various and eclectic sources rather than from Spanish surrealism alone, and that, in fact, this surrealism is probably less significant for him than others have claimed. In this eclecticism, if in little else, Wright resembles Jerome Rothenberg: dur92 

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ing the late 1950s and early 1960s both poets were reading widely and drawing on disparate sources of inspiration. Conventional wisdom casts the controversial Robert Bly (1926–) in the role of the intellectual and entrepreneurial force behind deep image poetics. As we have seen, Bly’s own poetry of the early 1960s is so close to that of Wright that a separate treatment would probably be redundant. Bly’s political poetry of the latter part of the decade ends up owing more to Neruda, in his attempt to find a way of fusing the surrealist style with political poetry in order to protest the war in Vietnam. Bly, like Rothenberg and Kelly, uses Latin American and European poetry to intervene in an ongoing debate about American poetry. Much of Bly’s writing in the 1960s relies on the questionable assumption that international poets, whether from Europe or Latin America, share some essential quality largely absent from U.S. poetry (and English-language poetry generally) before about 1960. This element is usually defined as a faith in the value of the prerational mind, or as a distrust of Cartesian rationality. Only poetry written in English, presumably, is left out of the main irrationalist current found in French, German, Scandinavian, Spanish, and Latin American poetry of the twentieth century. From this perspective, U.S. poetry might seem gravely deficient. Bly’s oft-cited essay “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry,” first published in 1963, juxtaposes passages from Rilke, Jiménez, Quasi­ modo and other emblematic poets (in English translation of course) with stanzas from “academic” poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Karl Shapiro.39 The point of this comparative excercise is supposed to be to demonstrate the lack of interiority in the work of the American poets in comparison to European and Latin American modernists. After citing a very brief poem by Quasimodo he makes a categorical statement: “A poem is something that penetrates for an instant into the unconscious. If it can penetrate in this way, freshly, several times, then it is a poem of several lines. But if it does not do this it is not a poem at all, no matter how long it is.”40 While the passages quoted from non-U.S. poets are intended to reveal the obvious inadequacy of American poetry of a certain variety, the deep image 

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Bly’s comparisons might suggest other conclusions to a reader with a different mind-set. While I would never argue that Juan Ramón Jiménez or César Vallejo are inferior to Shapiro or Jarrell, the passages translated by Bly from European and Latin American poets lack the linguistic concentration we expect from good poetry. Bly’s translated poetry is not “language charged with meaning” in the Poundian sense: his versions strip Rilke and Machado of their linguistic specificity—a quality that is strikingly evident in American poets like Bishop and Lowell. One almost gets the sense that Bly prefers the generic sound of his own rather flat translations to the unique German, Italian, and Spanish tonalities of his favorite poets. It is not surpring, then, that Bly presents a rather simplistic view of Lorca’s complex poetics. In the last section of an essay entitled “Looking for Dragon Smoke,” dated 1967–71, Bly specifically evokes the Lorquian duende. After quoting several passages from Lorca’s essay, he gives an account of how he supposes Lorca to have written the poems of Poeta en Nueva York: The Spanish “surrealist” or “leaping” poet often enters into his poem with a heavy body of feeling piled up behind him as if behind a dam. Some of that water is duende water. The poet enters the poem excited, with the emotions alive; he is angry or ecstatic, or disgusted. There are a lot of exclamation marks, visible or invisible. Almost all the poems in Lorca’s Poet in New York are written with the poet profoundly moved, flying.41

This is a fair sample of Bly’s characteristic prose style and mode of argumentation on this topic. While Bly echoes Rothenberg’s interest in heightened emotions, he presents a much simpler, hydraulic view of poetic creation, in which “duende water” overflows powerfully into the writing of the poem. In his preface to his translation of Lorca in Lorca & Jiménez, Bly comes up with a smilar hydraulic metaphor: “What we could call desire-energy passes through Lorca’s poems as if the lines were clear arteries created for it.”42 Rothenberg’s original concept of the deep image, in contrast, is more elaborately detailed, involving a self-conscious attentiveness to “the emotional contours 94 

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of objects.” Rothenberg would never have come to Bly’s conclusion about Lorca’s poetry: “it’s as though an animal had written many of his stanzas.”43 Bly’s account of Spanish surrealism is obviously not an academically rigorous one: his lively metaphors are meant to cast his poetic ideal into sharp contrast with other, more intellectually based and less subjectivist modes. In addition to the academic poetry in the Auden school (Bishop, Lowell, Shapiro), he takes aim at the Pound-Williams tradition: Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams themselves along with the objectivists (Zukofsky, Oppen) and the Black Mountain school (Olson, Blackburn, Creeley). In establishing a crude dichotomy between these schools of American poetry and the international trends he favors, Bly does not stop to consider significant differences within Spanishlanguage poetry. The hyperrationalist, intellectual artificer Jorge Guillén, for example, stands at the opposite pole from the more intuitive Federico García Lorca. (Guillén is probably closer to Wallace Stevens.) A lack of knowledge of more recent Spanish poetry prevents Bly from considering the question of why a poet like Jaime Gil de Biedma would look to W. H. Auden, a strong influence on “academic” poets like Jarrell, Shapiro, and Bishop, rather than to his compatriot Federico García Lorca. Bly is also guilty of falsely attributing his own biases to his favorite foreign-language poets. He is deaf to the metrical subtlety of the free verse of Lorca and Jiménez. Of the latter poet, known to be neurotically obsessed with formal perfection, he makes this astonishingly ignorant statement, once again substituting his favorite hydraulic metaphor for a more nuanced approach: “His emphasis on how the poet lived, rather than on rhythm or technique, is precisely why so much poetry flowed from him into the younger poets.”44 Bly’s contribution to American poetry is also controversial because of his own practice as a translator, which, as noted above, tends to be insensitive to the linguistic specificity of the original text. Most commentators give him credit for introducing a wide spectrum of Latin American and European poetry into the United States beginning in the late 1950s. Although he was not the only translator active during this the deep image 

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period, his voice was arguably the most influential, and thus the most potentially damaging. Dana Gioia states the case for the prosecution: His slapdash method ignored both the obvious formal qualities of the originals (like rhyme and meter) and, more crucially, those subtler organizing principles such as diction, tone, rhythm, and texture that frequently gave the poems their intensity. Concentrating almost entirely on syntax and imagery, Bly reduced the complex originals into abstract visual blueprints.45

This complaint echoes Creeley’s earlier worry, expressed in his 1960 letter to Rothenberg, that “a generalizing manner” based on translation would undermine the complex logopoeia and melopoeia of contemporary American poetry.46 Creeley was probably thinking just as much of Bly as of Rothenberg himself, since Bly had written unfavorably about Creeley in the pages of The Fifties as a poet supposedly lacking in interiority. Bly’s translations, generally speaking, are not well regarded among critics and poets who place a high premium on linguistic specificity, the concrete particulars that distinguish one poet from another. The complaint from the neoformalist right (Gioia) is nearly identical to that posed by the avant-garde left. At his worst, Bly can be both clumsy and inaccurate. The first stanza of Lorca’s elegant lyric “Juan Ramón Jiménez,” an homage to his neurotic precursor, demonstrates both flaws: En el blanco infinito, nieve, nardo y salina, perdió su fantasía. •  •  •

Into the infinite white, snow, spice-plant, and salt he took his imagination, and lost it.47

The translation of nardo [spikenard] as spice-plant is odd, but what is worse is the awkward complication of Lorca’s fairly straightforward 96 

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syntax, which is easy to render in English: “In the infinite white, / snow, spikenard, and salt-flat, / he lost his fantasy.” The extra verb took is both distracting and rhythmically inept. Despite his lack of sensitivity, the quality of Bly’s translations of Machado, Jiménez, Lorca, Aleixandre, Neruda, Vallejo, and Hernández might not be a major determining factor in the reception of this poetry in the United States. In other words, if Bly had been a somewhat better or even a somewhat worse translator from the Spanish, the ultimate outcome might have been the same. While I would prefer to argue that the quality of translation is fundamental to the assimilation of Lorca into U.S. poetry, this is not necessarily the case. In the first place, readers do not necessarily expect translation to convey the linguistic specificity of the original text, its particular accent and tone. Secondly, those put off by Bly had their choice of several other translators: James Wright, Edwin Honig, Nathaniel Tarn, and several others produced stronger versions from Spanish-language poetry during the same period. Bly’s versions of Lorca did not appear in book form until 1973, long after Lorca had become an established presence in U.S. poetry, so it is unlikely that his inadequacy as a translator made much of a difference. Futhermore, since Spanish is the most commonly studied and spoken language in the United States after English, readers with widely varying competence of reading knowledge of Spanish often use the right-hand pages of a bilingual editions as an aid to read the original text on the left, rather than reading the translations as poems in their own right. As we saw in chapter 3, American poets of the 1950s not were deterred in the slightest by the obvious distortions of Ben Belitt’s Poet in New York, an edition that helped to rekindle the Lorca vogue of the second half of that decade. Nor is it the case that more adept translations of Lorca will necessarily result in a better class of American Lorquismo. The quality of translation matters a great deal to scholars interested in accuracy, as well as to readers in search of a text acceptable to them as poetry in English. Inadequate translations, however, do not hinder the creation of the apocryphal American Lorcas. the deep image 

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IV. The Legacy of the Deep Image

The mainstream deep image school founded by Wright and Bly gives rise to two ubiquitous styles found in American poetry in the 1960s and beyond: the realism of poets like Donald Hall, John Haines, and David Ignatow, and the absurdist, whimsical mode of James Tate and other poets who came of age in the late 1960s. There would really be no reason to consider Stafford and poets of his ilk as a deep image poets at all, were it not for the fact that their names appear with some frequency in the critical literature on the movement. Aside from the use of a stock vocabulary (river, silent, stillness, hidden, dark) and a certain earnestness of tone, Stafford’s plain-speaking simplicity takes us far afield from Rothenberg’s insistence on the value of surprisingly intuitive connections, as well as from Bly’s surrealist-inspired “leaping poetry.” Much the same could be said of Ignatow or any number of poets of this period, although each poet occupies a unique place along the continuum between midwestern realism and Spanish-tinged surrealism. Ignatow, for example, has more plausible credentials as a deep image poet than does Stafford. The other main form of second generation deep image poetry increases rather than decreases the number of surprising images. Take James Tate’s oft-anthologized poem “The Wheel Chair Butterfly”: O sleepy city of reeling wheelchairs where a mouse can commit suicide if he can concentrate long enough on the history book of rodents in this underground town of electrical wheelchairs! The girl who is always pregnant and bruised like a pear rides her many-stickered bicycle backward up the staircase of the abandoned trolleybarn.48

The point here seems to be the creation of a fanciful alternate universe, a world in which ordinary reality is turned inside out. The resulting 98 

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mood is one of playful incongruity, a distant cousin to Rothenberg’s more solemn but equally absurdist mode. Other varieties of American surrealism also thrive during this period, including the deadpan prose parables of Russell Edson and Charles Simic and the slightly less whimsical style of Mark Strand. The sources of this surrealism include Spanish poetry but also French surrealist poets like Max Jacob. By all accounts the proliferation of creative writing programs in U.S. universities in the 1970s brought with it an institutionalization of the deep image school. The most common mode of writing promulgated in such programs was, in fact, a deep image mode that oscillated between realist autobiography and surrealist whimsy. Some critical assessment of the period style of this decade has been negative: Rasula, for example, denounces “the seemingly motorized production of poems emitted from a kind of deep image popgun,” while Robert Kelly complains in even stronger terms: “It is deeply painful to me to see its name [the deep image] applied to incompetent bourgeois romanticism.”49 The phrase “motorized production” points to the productiveness of this mode in the academic setting. Editing lists by previous critics, Paul Breslin identifies the “central lexicon” of deep image poetry as “wings, jewels, stones, silence, breath, snow, blood, eats, water, light, bones, roots, glass, absence, sleep, and darkness,” in the process of trenchantly criticizing this poetry for its formulaic character and its political confusions.50 The deep image poem turned out to be relatively easy for young poets to produce, given its limited lexicon, simplified syntax, and flat, end-stopped free verse. It certainly did not require a detailed or nuanced grasp of literary history. Its formulaic lexicon, nonetheless, was also flexible enough to accomodate both the realism of William Stafford and the more whimsical mode of James Tate, as well as the organically based metaphors of Wright and Bly. Very few literary modes in the history of the world have been so successful in purely quantitative terms as the poetry of the deep image, given the expansion of writing programs during this period. Bly, Wright, Rothenberg, and Kelly were working in relative isolation during the late 1950s and early 1960s; in the final phase of deep image poetics, “Spanish the deep image 

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surrealism” becomes popular among hundreds if not thousands of U.S. poets. Pablo Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, and Vicente Aleixandre in 1977. Bly published several volumes of translations during this period, Neruda & Vallejo (1971), Lorca & Jiménez (1973), and Twenty Poems of Vicente Aleixandre (1977). Hardie St. Martin’s landmark anthology Roots & Wings: Poetry from Spain 1900–1975 appeared in 1976, featuring translations by Bly, Merwin, and other contemporary U.S. poets, most of whom were associated in some way with deep image poetics. Translations of Neruda also seemed ubiquitous in literary magazines during the 1970s. The appearance of so many significant publications around the same time supports my subjective sense, derived from my personal history with this poetry, that the vogue for Spanish surrealism reached its apogee in the late 70s, having gathered steam in the previous decade. As a very young poet in the late 1970s, I remember being very excited about Spanish-language poetry, to the point that I learned Spanish specifically in order to read these poets in the original. It was my interest in this poetry, in fact, that led me to become a Hispanist specializing in modern peninsular poetry, after studying for a year in Madrid in college. While not every young poet of my generation followed this career path, my interest in Spanish-language poetry was not at all atypical. Of course, younger American poets associated with a vaguely Spanish mode of oneiric surrealism during the 1970s were not always close or deep readers of the putative sources of deep image poetry: the poetry of Neruda, Lorca, and Aleixandre. In many cases, the stylistic models for young MFA students were other American poets like Greg Kuzma or Gregory Orr, whose stylistic influences, in turn, were poets like James Tate, Philip Levine, and Mark Strand. Spanish surrealism, in other words, might be considered as a completely domestic mode of American poetry—not as a dialogue with foreign models. Levine himself, in fact, was an impassioned reader of Lorca, but a young poet imitating Levine’s style might not feel it necessary to read Lorca with the same depth or intensity.51 The availability of so many bilingual editions of Spanish-language poetry in this period indicates that a large 100 

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number of poets were reading some Neruda, Aleixandre, or Lorca, but this reading does not necessarily translate into a deep engagement. While the high-water mark for deep image poetry is the 1970s, the period of the most significant influence of Lorca himself in U.S. poetry occurs, as I argued in chapter 2, in the period stretching from about 1952 to 1962, when Creeley, Spicer, Ginsberg, Koch, Merwin, and Blackburn were first exploring his work, incorporating him into U.S. poetics in a meaningful way. The invention of the deep image in the 1960s, then, comes toward the end of this period: the popularization of Lorca in the 1970s and beyond is an aftereffect. I have reached this possibly controversial conclusion little by little while researching and writing this book. Even for a relatively well-informed reader such as myself, the early history of Lorca in the English-speaking world has been buried under an onslaught of imitations of imitations of Spanish surrealism. I remember that I did not learn of the existence of Jack Spicer until I went to graduate school in the early 1980s. I knew of Rothenberg by around 1977 or so, but only as the translator of Native American poetry in Shaking the Pumpkin and the anthologist of tribal poetries of Technicians of the Sacred—not as the originator of deep image poetry twenty years earlier. Lorca and Neruda are still very widely read in the United States, in part at least because of the legacy of the deep image mode. Second generation deep image poets like Strand, Tate, and Simic number among the most celebrated figures on the literary scene. This school of poetry has been extravagantly successful, then, both in promulgating itself and in establishing a certain canon of poetry-in-translation. Nevertheless, this examination of the deep image has taken us on too long a detour from what was supposed to be the subject of this book: it is Lorca’s odd elusiveness within American poetry that has been the main story here.

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5 Apocryphal Lorca Robert Creeley and Jack Spicer

The most logical place to look for Lorca in postwar American poetry is in deep image poetry. As we have seen, however, his influence there is more often than not diluted in an amorphous wash of “Spanish surrealism.” As noted in the previous chapter, most academic accounts of deep image poetry merely list his name alongside those of Machado, Jiménez, Neruda, and Vallejo—as though his poetry were indistinguishable from that of any other poet writing in the Spanish language. The best way to understand the magnitude of this oversimplification is to imagine a similar assumption about poetry written in English during the twentieth century. Imagine the reaction of the well-informed reader of poetry if someone put Yeats, Stevens, Frost, Williams, Auden, Levertov, Rich, Larkin, Walcott, and Berrigan in the general category of “Anglo-Saxon Sensibility,” seeing all these poets as manifestations of a monolithic English-speaking essence. Between Spain and the Spanishspeaking countries of the New World there is a stylistic variety that rivals that of the English-speaking world. Cuba, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, Perú, Nicaragua, and Argentina, to mention only a few, have particularly well developed national poetic traditions. In the years immediately prior to the emergence of deep image poetry, a few American poets put Lorca to more personal and idiosyncratic uses. Jack Spicer’s 1957 After Lorca is not only the most extended

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and complex instance of Lorquian apocrypha in any language, but also a crucial work in his own development as a poet and, consequently, one of the most significant works of postwar American poetry—if we view Spicer as an indispensable figure in this period. Before discussing Spicer’s book, I will briefly examine a Robert Creeley poem of the same title, written five years earlier in 1952. Creeley’s “After Lorca” does not have great significance within his own literary formation: it is quite different from Creeley’s poetry of the early 1950s and did not lead him in new directions for his subsequent work. “After Lorca,” nonetheless, is noteworthy both as the first apocryphal Lorca poem written in English and as an intriguing instance of experimental translation. Chapters 6 and 7 will be devoted to two poets of the New York School, Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, whose approach to Lorca is also idiosyncratic. These highly individualized versions of Lorca, I would argue, provide a corrective to the standard account, in which Lorca’s main influence on American poetry is his sponsorship of the deep image. The recapitulation will be a discussion of Jerome Rothenberg’s The Lorca Variations, in chapter 8. I. Robert Creeley: “After Lorca”

Creeley’s “After Lorca” came into existence through a rather unusual process. Creeley, who was living in France at the time, met a Spaniard named “Martí” who claimed to be a childhood friend of Federico García Lorca. (No source of which I am aware provides Martí’s first name or any other clue to his identity.) Creeley’s biographer offers a credulous account of the writing of this poem—an account that closely follows a letter that Creeley wrote to Charles Olson in 1952: Martí knew entire poems and plays by Lorca by heart. One evening, after hearing him recite a poem by Lorca in both Spanish and French, Bob composed an English rendering he entitled “After Lorca”: The church is a business, and the rich are the business men. When they pull the bells, the

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poor come piling in, and when a poor man dies he has a wooden cross and they rush through the ceremony. But when a rich man dies, they drag out the Sacrament and a golden cross, and go doucement, doucement to the cemetery. And the poor love it and think it’s crazy.1

Creeley, by all accounts, was resistant to learning foreign languages, and so it is possible that even if Martí’s Lorca poem had been authentic, there might have been a large degree of error in the transmission of this poem. This incident occurred before Creeley moved to Mallorca, so his comprehension of Spanish would have been relatively weak.2 This text, then, has an extraordinarily convoluted provenance: there are two versions of the original poem, one in French and another in Spanish, transmitted orally rather than in writing, to an American poet living abroad who does not know either language with any great fluency. It would be hard to devise a less reliable method of textual transmission outside of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges! The French adverb doucement (in place of the Spanish dulcemente) makes the secondhand nature of the text manifest: it may be a deliberate attempt to mark the difference between the translation and the original, by referring to the third language involved in the process of transmission and translation—Martí’s French translation of the Lorca poem he recited from memory to Creeley. Creeley’s poem is the translation of a translation.3 It is not completely clear whether Creeley himself, later in his career, continued to think of “After Lorca” as a version of an actually existent Lorca poem. If he realized his mistake he was not eager to correct it.4 Needless to say, this poem is not based on any known Lorca text. More significantly, it is not particularly close to Lorca’s style of social critique. The Spanish poet had a complex, ambivalent relation to the religion of his upbringing, and, in fact, was quite enamoured of Cath104 

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olic pageantry. He would never have countenanced blunt explanations like “The church is a business, and the rich / are the business men.” When he does question organized religion, it tends to be in the highly wrought language of “Oda al Santísmo Sacramento” and “Grito hacia Roma.” By the same token, when he engages in social commentary in his poetry, it is usually in highly stylized and metaphorical imagery, or through dramatic conflict—never in the mode of earnest, expository denunciation. The sarcasm of “and the poor love it / and think it’s crazy” is also alien to Lorca’s sensibility. An anonymous flamenco lyric, collected in Antonio Machado y Álvarez’s Cantes flamencos y cantares, is a plausible source for Creeley’s “After Lorca”: Cuando se muere argún pobre ¡qué solito ba el extierro! y cuando se muere un rico ba la música y er clero.5 •  •  •

[When a poor man dies he goes all alone to his burial, and when a rich man dies music and clergy come along.]

Creeley’s poem could easily be read as a gloss on this song—or on a similar piece of folklore such as the proverb “El cura, cuando muere un rico, mata un buen cochino” [The priest, when a rich man dies, slaughters a fine hog]. Funeral masses were a major source of income for rural priests, so the idea is that the death of a rich man brings an immediate economic benefit to the clergy. Perhaps it is this very same flamenco lyric, or some variant of it, that Martí recited that evening, passing it off as a poem by Lorca to an unsuspecting foreigner; or perhaps Martí really believed that this was a genuine Lorca poem? Other scenarios are possible: Creeley’s lack of fluency in Spanish and French could have led him to invent a new text that had little to do with whatever poem his Spanish friend recited that evening.6 Apocryphal Lorca: Robert Creeley and Jack Spicer 

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What is significant here is the way in which “Lorca” becomes a blank slate onto which any cultural meme associated with the Spanishspeaking world might be written. In this case, it is the idea that the Catholic church is allied with the more comfortable classes in Spanishspeaking countries. At the same time, the Creeley/Martí poem does not evoke specifically Lorquian clichés like the Andalusian duende or the nightmare cityscape of “Nueva York.” In the early 1950s, such clichés were perhaps not yet as widely circulated as they would be in subsequent decades: it was an utter lack of knowledge of Lorca’s poetry, in fact, that allowed Creeley the license to create a poem utterly unlike either Lorca’s or Creeley’s own poetry, and refreshingly devoid of conventional Lorquismo as well.7 II. Jack Spicer: After Lorca

Creeley’s 1952 “After Lorca” precedes the explosion of interest in Lorca by three or four years. By the mid-1950s, the Spanish poet was becoming much better known, with the publication of the Selected Poems by New Directions and Ben Belitt’s translation Poet in New York by Grove Press. It was the New Directions volume that Jack Spicer had at his side when he first began to translate Lorca.8 Thirteen of the translations in Spicer’s book derive from poems translated, by various hands, in The Se­ lected Poems of Federico García Lorca. According to Spicer’s biographers, a Puerto Rican scholar named Rosario Jiménez had introduced Lorca’s work to the poets of the so-called Berkeley Renaissance (Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser) several years before, in the late 1940s.9 After Lorca includes the following texts: (1) an apocryphal preface written from the grave by “Federico García Lorca, Somewhere outside Granada”; (2) a series of six letters written from Spicer to Lorca (interspersed with the poems of the book) in which the American poet explains his poetics to the deceased Spanish writer; (3) translations of actual Lorca poems (and one short play) with some deliberate “mistranslations” of words and phrases; (4) apocryphal translations of nonexistent Lorca poems, described in the introduction as either poems that Lorca supposedly sent Spicer from “beyond the grave” or 106 

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“fanciful imitations of my early style”10; (5) hybrid texts—translations of authentic Lorca poems with the addition of some apocryphal material; and (6) “Radar: A Postscript for Marianne Moore,” the only poetic text in the book not identified explicitly as a “translation.” With the exception of this final text, all the poems in the book, whether or not they have a source in Lorca’s work, are explicitly labelled as translations, and all but one is dedicated to a particular individual, usually a friend of the poet’s. One poem is self-dedicated: “A translation for Jack Spicer.”11 While Spicer does not indicate which of the poems in the book are translations of extant Lorca texts, this is not an inherently difficult task. In “The Lorca Working,” Clayton Eshleman, himself a distinguished translator of Vallejo, looks at each poem in Spicer’s book in order to distinguish the translations from the original Spicer poems. There are thirty-four poems in total (two of which are actually short plays): Eshleman identifes eleven of these as “Spicer poems” and the remaining twenty-three as translations of extant Lorca texts. Since the eleventh Spicer poem is the postscript “Radar,” there are a total of ten “apocryphal translations.” Writing in Eshleman’s wake, Lori Chamberlain relates Spicer’s translation practice to “a larger postmodern poetics of translation that we could locate in the work of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, Harry Mathews, Raymond Federman, the concrete poets, bp nichol—writers for whom translation is not a subsidiary activity but who have revived the idea that all writing is translation.”12 She goes on to suggest that Eshleman’s distinction between “meaningful” and “arbitrary” translations is itself arbitrary, in view of Spicer’s larger poetic aims.13 Taking my cue from Chamberlain’s article, I propose to look at After Lorca more specifically in its complex transformations and place it in the context of other U.S. versions of Lorquismo. Aside from “Ode for Walt Whitman,” from Poeta en Nueva York, and the short play “Buster Keaton’s Ride,” Spicer’s selections from Lorca’s work come from only three collections: Libro de poemas, Canciones, Apocryphal Lorca: Robert Creeley and Jack Spicer 

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and Diván del Tamarit. These books contain mostly short, lyrical poems with repetitive structures; Libro de poemas and Canciones are both early works, whereas Diván del Tamarit, with its somewhat darker tone, comes at the end of Lorca’s career.14 Spicer translates nothing from either Romancero gitano [Gypsy ballads] or Poema del cante jondo [Poem of the deep song], avoiding the specifically gypsy thematics for which Lorca has been celebrated both in Spain and internationally. He also sidesteps Lorca’s “surrealism” for the most part, since he includes only one poem from Poeta en Nueva York. Spicer’s idiosyncratic treatment of Lorca’s poetry makes it difficult to evaluate him as a conventional translator of the Spanish poet alongside prominent American poets like Honig, Rothenberg, or Merwin. Spicer’s own authorial statements do not necessarily heighten our confidence in him as a translator: “The fact that I didn’t know Spanish really well enough to translate Lorca was the reason I could get in contact with Lorca.”15 “When I translate one of your poems and I come across words I do not understand, I always guess at their meanings. I am inevitably right.”16 Eshleman makes a strong case, nonetheless, that Spicer’s “Ode for Walt Whitman” is “by far the best version to date” of that poem, despite his “distortions” of the text.17 Even with obvious mistranslations, and some awkwardly literal readings, Spicer’s translations are often quite effective as poems in English. He translates Lorca’s “Suicide,” for example, like this: At ten o’clock in the morning The young man could not remember. His heart was stuffed with dead wings And linen flowers. He is conscious that there is nothing left In his mouth but one word. When he removes his coat soft ashes Fall from his arms. Through the window he sees a tower He sees a window and a tower. 108 

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His watch has run down in its case He observes the way it was looking at him. He sees his shadow stretched Upon a white silk cushion. And the stiff geometric youngster Shatters the mirror with an ax. The mirror submerges everything In a great spurt of shadow.18

Of course, a reader comparing this translation to Lorca’s poem might complain that Spicer inverts the order of the first two lines of the poem, changes some past tense verbs to the present, and substitutes coat for guantes [gloves]. Spicer’s poem, however, is designed to be read in the context of After Lorca alongside other translations and Lorquian apocrypha, not in a bilingual edition where every departure from literality must be justified. This context is crucial, since Spicer’s aim is to write after Lorca rather than to supply a reasonably accurate facsimile in another language.19 “Afternoon: A translation for John Barrow,” is typical of Spicer’s method of “translating” from nonexistent texts. Here no comparison with an original text is possible, although the reader might speculate about the Spanish of the lost original: The sky asks afternoon for a word. — “It is 1:36. A black cloud Has crossed one of the white clouds. 13 empty boats And a seagull.” The bay asks afternoon for a word. — “The wind is blowing Southwest at nine miles an hour I am in love with an ocean Whose heart is the color of wet sand. At 1:37 Apocryphal Lorca: Robert Creeley and Jack Spicer 

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13 empty boats And a seagull.” Afternoon asks the ocean, “Why does a man die?” — “It is 1:37 13 empty boats And a seagull”20

“The Lorcaesque refrain,” writes Eshleman, “becomes increasingly meaningless each time it is repeated.”21 In other words, Spicer takes a characteristically Lorquian device, the insistent refrain, and uses it in a manner antithetical to Lorca’s own practice: whereas Lorca’s repetitions are resonant, Spicer’s are purposefully “flattening,” draining language of its significance. “1:36” or “1:37” seems like any random time on the clock, an arbitrary time for a man to die, in contrast to the fullthroated resonance of Lorca’s “five in the afternoon.” Spicer achieves a similar effect with the risible refrain “You have fallen on your head” in “The Ballad of the Dead Woodcutter.”22 The procedure of emptying a particular poetic form of its content is, of course, typical of parody, which often works by replacing the serious with the comic while maintaining recognizable formal and stylistic elements. Is Spicer parodying Lorca, then? It depends on what one’s definition of parody is. In the first place, comedy is not the main effect here: even allowing for the reduction in resonance, there is a serious attempt to write in an authentically Lorquian style—or at least in a Lorquian style as Spicer apparently understood it. I concur with Eshleman’s judgment that the apocryphal “Ballad of Sleeping Somewhere Else” is particularly effective: The pine needles fall Like an ax in the forest Can you hear them crumble There where they are sleeping? The windows are close to the wall Here in the darkness they remain open. 110 

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(When I saw you in the morning My arms were full of paper.) Five hundred miles away The stars are glass that is breaking. The windows sag on the wall I feel cold glass in the blankets. Child, you are too tall for this bed. The pine needles fall Like an ax in the forest. Can you hear them crumble There where they are speaking.23

Here, too, the style is somewhat less resonant than would be typical for Lorca’s own work, although some of the Canciones have a similarly light touch. The parenthetical couplet “When I saw you in the morning / My arms were full of paper,” for example, presents a rather inconsequential image. Of course, the process of translation often produces a flattening effect, even when the translator is making a serious attempt to preserve resonance. The same could be said for much poetry supposedly inspired by the Lorquian duende: the mere mention of Lorca or of the duende is not enough to produce evocative results. The difference here is that Spicer is deliberately isolating and enhancing this particular kind of translation effect in order to evoke a tone that is at once childlike and alienated, as in some of Lorca’s own poetry. Here, at least, Spicer has perfect pitch. Spicer produces similarly striking effects in some of his translations of actual Lorca poems. “Song For September” is a very free adaptation of Lorca’s “Balada de la placeta.” “Believe it or not, this is a very early Lorca poem,” Eshleman comments, noting that “at least 80% of the lines appear to be arbitrary mistranslations and the shape of the orginal poem is completely altered.”24 The charge of “arbitrary mistranslation,” in my opinion, is not applicable in this case, since the changes introduced by Spicer produce poetic effects that are actually stronger than those of the original. Nor is it accurate to conclude that the overall structure Apocryphal Lorca: Robert Creeley and Jack Spicer 

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of the poem has suffered a major distortion, since Spicer preserves the overarching shape of the dialogue form. Lorca’s original poem, first published in the 1921 collection Libro de poemas, is a charming but somewhat conventional dialogue that falls well short of the level of his mature poetry. Spicer’s poem, in contrast, is a haunting evocation of psychological estrangement, cut free from Lorca’s lilting, childlike tone and derivative modernismo. Spicer offers a starker and more concentrated poetic language, as witnessed in the conclusions of each poem: Los niños ¿Te vas muy lejos, muy lejos del mar y de la tierra? Yo Se ha llenado de luces mi corazón de seda, de campanas perdidas, de lirios y abejas, y yo me iré muy lejos, más allá de esas sierras, más allá de los mares, cerca de las estrellas, para pedirle a Cristo Señor que me devuelva mi alma antigua de niño, madura de leyendas, con el gorro de plumas y el sable de madera. Los niños Ya nos dejas cantando en la plazuela, ¡arroyo claro, fuente serena!

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Las pupilas enormes de las frondas resecas heridas por el viento, lloran las hojas muertas.25 •  •  •

the children: You are going very far. I: I am going very far, farther than my poems, farther than the mountains, farther than the birds. I am going to ask Christ to give me back my childhood, ripe with sunburn and feathers and a wooden sword. the children: You have left us here to sing the death of your summer. And you will never return. A little river And a colored fountain And you will never return.26

There is a striking difference between Spicer’s vivid, concise, and contemporary language and the more conventional idiom employed by Spender and Gili to translate Lorca’s poem in the version found in the New Directions Selected Poems. Spicer’s use of prose is considerably more effective than this lilting accentual dimeter: My heart of silk is filled with lights, with lost bells, with lilies and bees. I will go very far, farther than those hills, farther than the seas, close to the stars, to beg Christ the Lord to give back the soul I had of old, when I was a child, ripened with legends, with a feathered cap and a wooden sword.27

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Since we know that Spicer had the Selected Poems on hand while writing After Lorca, his “Song for September” might be read as a free retranslation of Spender and Gili’s translation, a version that preserves Lorca’s infantile tone and rhythmic feel with a high degree of fidelity. Spicer presumably knew this translation, so his “arbitrary mistranslations” cannot be attributed to a failure to understand the original. It is only by mistranslating to this degree, in fact, that he is able to produce a poem of such striking orginality.28 There are two main critical approaches to the question of where Lorca’s voice ends and where Spicer’s begins. One can emphasize the merging of the two poetic voices, or look more analytically (as Eshleman did) in order to separate the real from the apocryphal Lorca. My own approach to the problem of textual fusion has been to determine first what is in fact Lorca’s and what is not, and then to examine the specific techniques Spicer employs to confuse the issue. Spicer himself, speaking through the voice of Lorca, seems to encourage the “lumpers” while offering up a challenge to the “splitters”: “Even the most faithful student of my work will be hard put to decide what is and what is not Garcia [sic] Lorca, as, indeed, he would be if he were to look into my present resting place. The analogy is impolite, but I fear the impoliteness is deserved.”29 Lorca’s mortal remains are mingled with those of other victims of nationalist repression in Granada in 1936. Spicer’s metaphor introduces an eerie and irreverent note into his project: reading his book is like looking into the grave of the poet. Robin Blaser offers an interesting account of his own reading of After Lorca, coming down ultimately on the side of the “lumpers”: The challenge may be accepted to search through Lorca to know what is Lorca’s, what is Jack’s, what is translated or changed, which is which. I’ve done this and wind up in the joining. The book proposes, instead, that one poet is the other. These poems and this poet continue the recognitions of the other poet and his poems. The game may be reopened and played by the reader.30

Blaser, understandably enough, is more interested in Spicer than in Lorca, and this might explain his emphasis on the fusion of poetic 114 

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voices. If the two voices are indeed fused, as he contends (“one poet is the other”), it is a fusion that takes place mostly on Spicer’s terrain, in terms set by him. Since both categories of poems—genuine and apocryphal translations—are presented to the reader in Spicer’s own American English, the difference between these poetic idioms is neatly effaced. Reading After Lorca one day away from my books and photocopies of articles, I could not remember whether “Song For September” was based on a Lorca text, although at some point I had taken notes on all the poems while consulting Eshleman’s article and my own Lorca books. The poem itself, with its combination of plausibly Lorquian elements and Spicerian distortions, could not resolve my uncertainty. I passed a few disquieting hours before I was able to return home and locate the text in my copy of the Selected Poems. Of course, this is a poem that courts this uncertainty. I have never had this problem with poems that more clearly fall on one side or the other of the line. “Ballad of the Seven Passages,” an apocryphal translation, includes very un-Lorquian lines like “Oh, / Damn Rimbaud, / Beauty is spelled with all the vowels of seven passages. / Shut your damned mouth.”31 Of course, the typical reader of Spicer’s book, whether in 1957 or 2007, would not be expected to have any expert knowledge of Lorca’s poetry, or the inclination to look up scholarly articles on the work. To work through the book “blindly,” without ascertaining which poems are authentic translations, remains a legitimate strategy for reading. Spicer’s concept of poetic dictation introduces an unpredictable variable into any possible judgment of his achievement as a translator. It was in the writing of After Lorca that Spicer first developed this concept. He believed quite genuinely that he was channeling Lorca’s voice rather than translating or parodying Lorca: “It happened about halfway through when I was writing After Lorca, when the letters to Lorca started coming and being dictated and the poems, instead of being translations, were dictated.”32 Although Spicer would develop other metaphors for the process of poetic dictation (a radio, a “punchdrunk prize-fighter”), dictation itself is not intended to be a metaphor for more conventional notions of poetic inspiration.33 As he explained Apocryphal Lorca: Robert Creeley and Jack Spicer 

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in his Vancouver lectures, “I’ve never gotten any poet but Lorca, which was just a direct connection like on the telephone. Which wasn’t the poets of the past but was Mr. Lorca talkin’ directly.”34 The idea of a poetic muse or duende, in other words, is not meant as a stand-in for the Jungian collective unconscious or a Freudian id; it is not a metaphor for a process of making contact with another part of the mind, or a method of surrealist psychic automatism. Dictation comes from something quite literally outside of the poet’s mind. In this case, presumably, from “Mr. Lorca” himself. Does a more literal-minded understanding of Spicer’s practice of dictation prevent us from taking After Lorca as a Borgesian game in the same family as Kenneth Koch’s “Some South American Poets”? (See chapter 7.) Not necessarily. A genuine belief in dictation does not rule out a certain playfulness, along with a certain irreverence or flippancy in tone. Spicer’s dictation, by his own account, arose directly out of the practice of reading, translating, and imitating Lorca, halfway through the project. It was not, in other words, a method already in place from the onset. There is no way to determine which of the poems were generated through auditory hallucinations (if that is what dictation really is), and which are simply translations or imitations. What is more, nothing binds the reader to Spicer’s own statements about the work or to his authorial intention. Doesn’t the concept of dictation itself rule out any simplistic identification between the meaning of the text and the author’s conscious intentions, putting in play complex questions of authorial agency? Blaser describes this undermining of the position of the speaking voice in the following terms: This haunted meaning wanders in and out of the poems. And it is a proposal of the wildness of meaning—a lost and found, a coming and going. It is harsh and beautiful, and as Jack would say, “scary.” It takes the question—who is speaking in a poem?—and changes it into a question of where he is speaking—from what place—in what order—in what composition—a shadowy participant in a folding with something outside himself.35 116 

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It could also be argued that a large portion of Spicer’s own writing, both in After Lorca and in subsequent works, is not presented to the reader as dictated writing per se, but rather as a metapoetic reflection on the process of creation/dictation. “A Textbook of Poetry,” for example, addresses the differences between surrealism and Spicer’s conception of automatic writing; the title of this work suggests a didactic aim. Typically, the poetic voice in Spicer’s work struggles to understand and interpret what the “ghosts” or “Martians” are trying to tell him and the implications of the entire process. The ideal reading of After Lorca, then, would be one that took Spicer’s poetics seriously but not literally. It would be attentive to the quirky mix of tones—parodic, alienated, tragic—that the work puts into play, while avoiding a reductionist view of dictation. After Lorca raises a significant ethical issue: whether it is legitimate to graft one’s own poetic project onto that of a dead poet. Is this an act of poetic colonialism, and example of the “translator’s ego” that Eshleman denounced in Ben Belitt? I would like to exempt Spicer from a similar critique, on the grounds that he takes his trangression to the limit rather than presenting his work as a mere translation of the Spanish poet. The practice of dictation also mitigates the potentially egotistical dimension of Spicer’s translation project: in taking dictation from Lorca he is renouncing “the translator’s ego.” Lastly, Belitt’s translations do not achieve autonomy as “poetry in English” in the way Spicer’s do. This, of course, is simply my own subjective judgment: a reader who felt that Belitt was a poet of genius might conclude that his Poet in New York is apocryphal Lorca of the highest order. It could also be argued that Spicer’s After Lorca is productive of new poetic possibilties in English in a way that Belitt’s translations are not. Spicer proposes the following writing excercise in the questionnaire for his “Poetry as Magic” workshop: In any of the three following poems fill in each of the blanks with any number of words you wish (including none) attempting to make a complete and satisfactory poem. Do not alter any of the existing words or punctuation or increase the number of lines.36 Apocryphal Lorca: Robert Creeley and Jack Spicer 

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The second poem he provides for this excercise is his own translation of Lorca’s “Juan Ramón Jiménez,” the first poem of After Lorca, with some words and phrases excised: In ............ endlessness Snow, ............ salt He lost his ............ . The color white. He walks Over a ............ carpet made ............ . Without eyes or thumbs He suffers ............ But the............ quiver In the ............ endlessness How............a wound His ............ left. Snow, ............ salt ............ In the ............ endlessness.37

This fill-in-the-blank writing exercise provides a means of generating new texts in English—in a way analogous to the writing excercises Kenneth Koch derived from Lorca’s poetry in Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (see chapter 7). Spicer thus participates in the larger movement toward assimilating Lorca into a specifically American poetics. Lori Chamberlain points out that Spicer’s use of Lorca is an exception to the general tendency in the American revisioning of the Spanish poet: Lorca “has sponsored aesthetic theories as widely diverse as those of Robert Bly and Robert Duncan; his theory of the duende has been read as the archetype for all varieties of expressivist poetics. It is all the more interesting, then, that Lorca’s duende seems to be whispering in Spicer’s direction too, for Spicer’s poetics is aimed squarely against the ‘expressive.’ ”38 This is a notably astute observation. What Chamberlain calls “expressivist” poetics includes the deep image poetry of Bly and Rothenberg, Robert Duncan’s neoromanticism, and the orac­ 118 

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ular mode of Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara. I would add, in support of Chamberlain’s point, that it is precisely through his antiexpressivism that Spicer is able to avoid some common pitfalls of American Lorquismo, including the facile adoption of the term du­ ende itself. It is significant, to my mind, that he avoids this term completely in the text of After Lorca. He does discuss it briefly in his Vancouver lectures, but only in reponse to questions from the audience. He sounds surprisingly uninterested and evasive when addressing this issue; to Denise Levertov’s question, “do Lorca’s distinctions figure in your own thinking about it [the duende]?” he answers “no, not a bit.”39 This might seem like an odd response, since the duende, a dark force associated with death and poetic possession, would be the perfect metaphor for poetic dictation. During Spicer’s lifetime the duende was not yet the cliché it would later become, so we cannot necessarily conclude that he was avoiding it as a way of distancing himself from more facile versions of Lorquismo. Perhaps he intuited, though, that his Lorca was at odds with that of his contemporaries. Precisely by not seeking resonance, by distancing himself from “expressivist” poetics, Spicer produces an alienated and strikingly original vision of Lorca. Of all the U.S. poets who took inspiration from Lorca during the postwar period, in fact, it is Jack Spicer who had the deepest and broadest response—a response both free of orientalist cliché and generative of new poetic possibilities in the American idiom. Lorca also played a larger role in Spicer’s own poetic development than he did for any other comparable poet, with the possible exception of Rothenberg. It was in writing After Lorca that Spicer discovered the concepts of the serial poem and of dictation. Moreover, this book is one of Spicer’s most substantial and accomplished works. Of the twelve separate books that comprise The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, several are very brief sequences like the three-page A Red Wheelbarrow, a serial poem based on William Carlos Williams’s famous text, or the five-page Lament for the Makers. Only a few other Spicer books—perhaps Heads of the Town up to the Aether, Language, and Book of Magazine Verse—are works of comparable weight to After Lorca, in my opinion at least. Apocryphal Lorca: Robert Creeley and Jack Spicer 

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It is not immediately obvious why Jack Spicer should have been the American poet who drew the most sustenance from Lorca. He knew less Spanish than Rothenberg or Merwin and had no visible interest in Spanish poetry aside from Lorca. (In this last respect, though, he resembles Duncan, Ginsberg, Creeley, O’Hara, and Koch.) Unlike the deep image poets, he did not attempt to create a new school of poetry based on Spanish-language poetry. Lorca himself disappears from his writings after 1957, apart from brief references to After Lorca itself in his lectures and correspondence. A partial answer to this question is that gay poets like Spicer often felt a more personally fraught connection to the work of Lorca. Such poets often are more entranced by the charismatic figure of Lorca himself, and less by the myth of the duende or the attractions of Spanish “surrealism.” They are less likely to forget that “Franco has murdered Lorca the fairy son of Whitman,” as Allen Ginsberg so bluntly put it. This is only a partial answer because, of course, there is only one Jack Spicer: Duncan and Ginsberg, while revering Lorca, did not make as productive a use of his poetry in their own work. Another reason why this explanation is not sufficient is that Spicer’s response to Lorca is only partially defined by questions of gay identity, although of course he “identified with Lorca, the homosexual, dandy, anti-Fascist martyr.”40 From one perspective, the entire text of After Lorca is suffused with Spicer’s conflicted eroticism: many poems are dedicated to former lovers and gay friends. It is in his translation of Lorca’s “Oda a Walt Whitman,” however, where this issue comes to be forefront most explicitly. “Ode for Walt Whitman” is somewhat anomalous within the text of After Lorca: it clashes stylistically with the more lyrical side of Lorca that Spicer prefers, as well as with his own apocryphal Lorquiana. As we saw in chapter 2, the internalized homophobia of Lorca’s poem, with its notoriously vicious assault on “maricas de todo el mundo,” has rarely prevented gay American poets from identifying with it. The standard excuse for the viciousness of the poem, of course, is that it is directed only at the corrupt sexuality of the maricas, not at the pure 120 

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model of homosexuality embodied by the virginal figure of Whitman. Spicer’s friend George Stanley interpreted Spicer’s version of the poem in these terms: “He was quite puritanical, yeah. High Romanticism was close to his heart. So, also, particularly, was Lorca’s view as expressed in [‘Ode to Walt Whitman’] where he just gives it to all the cocksuckers of the world, the attitude that the cocksuckers of the world are destroying the possibility of true love between men.”41 This interpretation is already hard to tolerate, but Spicer makes matters worse, I think, by translating maricas (“fairies,” “queers,” “pansies,” etc.) with the more intense and graphic term cocksuckers, exacerbating rather than extenuating the violence of the poem’s attack. This translation, then, introduces a further complication into Spicer’s already problematic relation to his Spanish precursor, rather than pointing to a clearer view of the problem. The lifespan of Frank O’Hara coincided almost exactly with that of Jack Spicer. Spicer was born in 1925 and died in 1965; O’Hara lived from 1926 to 1966. Each stood at the center of an influential cluster of (mostly gay) poets, the Berkeley Renaissance and the New York School respectively. Although alike in some respects, they did not hit it off well during Spicer’s brief sojourn in New York.42 Each, however, participated in the collective Lorquismo of the 1950s in a highly idiosyncratic and personal way. O’Hara wrote “Failures of Spring,” a significant poem in which he measures his distance from Lorca in 1957, the year Spicer published After Lorca. It is to Frank O’Hara, then, that I now turn.

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6 Frank O’Hara’s “Lorcaescas”

The standard view of the relation of the New York school to Spanishlanguage poetry might run something like this: The poets of the “New York School”—John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest—remained aloof from the fashion for Spanish language poetry that was sweeping through American poetry in the later 1950s and the 1960s. Unlike poets associated with the concept of the deep image, they were never enthusiastic about the idea of a specifically Spanish or Spanish-American surrealism; they were not intensely involved with Lorca (as Spicer, Rothenberg, or Bly were) or with Spanish-American poets like Neruda, Vallejo, and Paz. In fact, they tended to get their surrealism directly from its original French sources.

This statement represents, more or less, my own point of departure for an examination of the possible influence of Lorca on Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch. I was originally skeptical that these two poets would play a large role in this book. After further investigation, however, I have come to a more complicated view of the relation of the New York poets both to Lorca and to French poetry. Both O’Hara and Koch were indeed swept up in the common Lorquismo of their poetic generation, confirming my contention that 122

Lorca’s pervasive influence is not confined to a single school or tendency.1 Moreover, their more distanced and ambivalent approach pro­ vides a useful corrective to more naive celebrations of the duende. A further question to be addressed is whether the “surrealist” mode found in certain places in O’Hara’s work might owe at least as much to Lorca as to the surrealist movement of André Breton.2 The cultural stereotypes assigned to French and Spanish literary traditions are deeply entrenched in American-literary culture, making such questions difficult to untangle. A consideration of the Lorquismo of the New York school, though, can help us to see beyond certain ideological presuppositions about national “characters” and gain a clearer picture of the “surrealism” of postwar American poetry. I. Frank O’Hara’s Spain

It is quite obvious that Frank O’Hara (1926–66) was primarily oriented toward French literature and culture; his engagement with Spain, in contrast, is not quite so visible. Explaining why O’Hara was never an anglophile, Marjorie Perloff notes that, with a few exceptions, “the poetic landscape of modern Britain struck O’Hara as excessively conventional and tame. It could not, in any case, compete with the Germany of Rilke, the Russia of Mayakovsky and Pasternak, or the Spain of Lorca—and certainly not with France.”3 But what exactly was O’Hara’s connection to “the Spain of Lorca”? Without being as knowledgeable as W. S. Merwin, he was better informed about contemporary Spanish culture than the typical poet of his generation. In his capacity as curator at the Museum of Modern Art, for example, he traveled to Madrid and Barcelona in 1960 and mounted a significant exhibition, bringing artists like Antoni Tàpies, Jorge Oteiza, Antonio Suárez, and Eduardo Chillida to the attention of the American public, and writing a brief essay for the catalogue New Spanish Painting and Sculpture.4 Spain, for Americans of the 1930s, meant, above all, the Spanish civil war, the prelude to the Second World War. (O’Hara was ten years old at the outbreak of the conflict, in the summer of 1936.) Leftists Frank O ’ Hara ’ s “ Lorcaescas ”  

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around the world supported the Spanish Republic, which also had the backing of the Soviet Union. Mussolini sent troops to aid Franco, and Hitler’s air force bombed the historic Basque town of Guernica. One of the very few childhood memories that O’Hara chooses to highlight in his “Autobiographical Fragments” was of an experience in parochial school: At any rate we are now approaching 1940 at a leisurely pace and my next political memory was that of revulsion at having been made to pray for Franco’s success during the Spanish Civil War when I was in grade school and didn’t know which side was which.5

It is striking that O’Hara chose to begin this fragment of an autobiography with a list of explicitly political memories, given his reputation as a largely apolitical poet. Presumably if he had known “which side was which” he would have been even more revolted. His disgust later found confirmation when he read For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel of the Spanish Civil War.6 Like any other American intellectual of his epoch, then, Frank O’Hara would have associated Federico García Lorca with the lost promise of the Spanish Republic and the rise of Fascism in the Europe of the 1930s. Picasso’s “Guernica” was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art where O’Hara worked as a curator. O’Hara himself reminds us that Robert Motherwell’s series of paintings Elegy for the Spanish Republic originally bore the title “At Five in the Afternoon, the repeated refrain of Garcia [sic] Lorca’s great elegy for the bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, a poem which undoubtedly inspired the whole series.”7 He reports having extensive conversations with the painter: “I first met Motherwell in East Hampton in, probably, 1952. When we did talk later, it was almost always about poetry: Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Jacob, Reverdy, Rilke (not much), and Lorca (lots), and we also got to Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.”8 It is not surprising that O’Hara would have had a lot to talk about with Motherwell, the most literary of the abstract-expressionist painters, and that Lorca would have come up frequently.9 124 

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O’Hara’s “Little Elegy for Antonio Machado” reflects the elegiac tone found in Motherwell’s paintings. This is the final poem included by Donald Allen in the posthumous volume The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, and thus one of the last poems that O’Hara wrote before his tragic accidental death in the summer of 1966. He begins by evoking the death of Machado and of the poet’s elderly mother at the conclusion of the civil war in 1939, after the two had escaped to Collioure in Southern France. The poem demonstrates a familiarity both with the circumstances of Machado’s death and with certain key aspects of Machado’s poetry, specifically his evocation of the landscape of central Spain (Campos de Castilla) and his exploration of Spanish national and historical identity in the wake of the Spanish-American war of 1898: Now your protesting demons summon themselves with fire against the Castilian dark and solitary light your mother dead on the hearth and your heart at rest on the border of constellary futures10

The diction of this poem seems strained in places, as though the poet were searching for a language adequate to the task of historical commemoration: No domesticated cemetery can enshroud your flight of linear solarities and quiescent tumbrils vision of the carrion past made glassy and golden to reveal the dark, the dark in all its ancestral clarity where our futures lie increasingly in fire twisted ropes of sound encrusting our brains your water air and earth insist in our joining you in recognition of colder prides and less negotiable ambitions

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mean here. What the poem seems to be suggesting, though, is that the meaning of Machado’s death cannot be contained in “domesticated cemeteries,” that is, a purely national context; this death has the power to clarify a vision of the decadent past (“the dark in all its ancestral clarity”) and enjoins us to create better versions of ourselves, turning pride and ambition to more positive uses. The poem concludes with a proposal for a certain ethics and aesthetics of elegy: We shall continue to correct all classical revisions of ourselves as trials of ceremonial worth and purple excess improving your soul’s expansion in the night and developing our own in salt-like praise

Evidently, “classical revisions” and “purple excess” stand in need of correction. The aim of elegy is to promote a certain sort of edification, an “expansion” of the soul, rather than to erect a pompous neoclassical monument. The poem, however, does not fully enact the aesthetics of commemoration that it proposes, due to its stylstic indecision. O’Hara probably did not feel a deep personal or aesthetic connection to Machado’s poetry: it is hard to imagine that he would have been attracted to the Spanish poet’s Castilian sobriety.11 “Little Elegy for Antonio Machado” does not convey the same feeling of engagement found in O’Hara’s more personal elegies, like his poems for Billie Holiday and James Dean.12 O’Hara’s interest in Spain develops in a public and political context, dominated by the Spanish civil war, “that perfect metaphor of all that was confused, venal, and wrong in national and international politics and has remained so.”13 His memory of praying for Franco’s victory in Catholic school, his writing on Motherwell and contemporary Spanish art, and his elegy for Machado all refer to the war and its political aftermath and attempt to define an appropriate aesthetics of historical commemoration. O’Hara’s Spain, in the first instance, is simply the Spain of the postwar American intelligentsia, poised between the tragic 126 

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past and the uncertain future. Does the new Spanish art create values that are not “chauvinistic” and “antiquated,” or does it delve deeply into the Spanish tradition, from its medieval roots through Velázquez and Goya? What historical lessons can be taken away from Machado’s clearheaded analysis of the “carrion past”? There is, however, a more private side to O’Hara’s Spain, visible in the comic play Awake in Spain and in poems like “Now That I am in Madrid and Can Think” and “Having a Coke with You.”14 O’Hara’s engagement with Federico García Lorca belongs to this more intimate sphere—involving his own self or “selves”—but at the same time it remains somewhat cautious and ambivalent. Instead of expressing uncritical admiration for Lorca, O’Hara uses him as a foil to explore aspects of his own subjectivity. II. O’Hara’s Lorca

The 1957 poem “Failures of Spring” associates Federico García Lorca quite explicitly with a particular facet of O’Hara’s own personal identity: I’m getting rather Lorcaesque lately and I don’t like it. Better if my poetry were, instead of my lives. So many aspects of a star, the Rudolph Valentino of sentimental reaction to dives and crumby ex-jazz hangouts, I put on my sheik’s outfit and sit down at the pianola, like when I first discovered aspirin. And I shall never make my lorcaescas into an opera. I don’t write opera. So hot, so hot the night my world is trying to send up its observation satellite.15

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What is most striking here is the way in which O’Hara considers the author of Poeta en Nueva York as a model of an implicitly gay subjectivity: to be “Lorcaesque” in this context is to engage in a particular form of “slumming” associated with “dives and crummy ex-jazz hangouts” that now, presumably, are gay bars. The political and folkloric elements that define the reception of Lorca in the United States give way to a highly personal relationship fraught with playful ambivalence. The first line of the poem asserts an identification with the Spanish poet that the second line (in a reversal typical of O’Hara’s poetry) immediately negates: “and I don’t like it.” The very next sentence introduces a significant qualification to this first negation: “Better if my poetry were / instead of my lives.” Lorca’s poetry, then, escapes the condemnation implicit in the speaker’s negative attitude toward the Lorcaesque mode in his own style of self-presentation. He would prefer to emulate the genuine achievement of Lorca’s work, rather than this certain seedy ambience. This professed admiration for Lorca’s actual poetry, however, remains tantalizingly elusive, since O’Hara seems more concerned in this poem with avoiding a certain quality that he associates with the image of Spanish poet, than with being open to Lorca’s poetic influence. This may be one of the first uses of the adjective Lorcaesque in English-language literature. As such, the adjective has only the meaning that O’Hara ascribes to it (by implication) in the context of this poem: “lushly-romantic in a dated, campy, orientalist style associated with Rudolph Valentino and the silent movie era, the period when the pianola was in vogue.” It is easy to conjure up an image of Lorca frequenting seedy dives and tasting the ambience of jazz-age Harlem during his 1929–30 sojourn in New York; there are even extant photographs of Lorca dressed as an Arab sheik, although I doubt that O’Hara would have had access to them. (Valentino, of course, starred in Sheik of Araby and many other silent films.) The key elements of O’Hara’s Lorquismo here are an evocation of New York during the jazz age and a certain orientalism. “Failures of Spring,” however, treats this orientalism ironically, as a form of drag : being Lorcaesque means dressing up as Valentino and sitting down at the player piano. (Both O’Hara and Lorca were aspiring pianists at one 128 

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point in their lives.)16 The Lorcaesque is a role that is performed ironically rather than a fixed identity. What is especially noteworthy here is that O’Hara was savvy enough to distinguish this particular form of camp from the intrinsic value of Lorca’s poetry. A Lorcaesque identity, for O’Hara, is associated with an outmoded costume. The poem concludes with an image from the present, the age of space exploration, that contrasts with this dated image. Since the poem is dated June of 1957, it is not a reference to the Soviet Sputnik satellite, which would take flight in October of that same year, but to the rather less successful U.S. Vanguard program, which was attempting to launch artificial satellites during the spring and summer. As in O’Hara’s writing on Spanish art and his “Little Elegy for Antonio Machado,” there is a certain tension between an orientation toward the past and a desire to advance expansively into the future. An “observation satellite” would provide the speaker with a fresh perspective on the world on a hot steamy night, during a summer when he has been feeling trapped in a mood of languid nostalgia. O’Hara’s use of the plural my lives (rather than the more expected my life) in “Failures of Spring” is a significant instance of what critics have called O’Hara’s “Protean” sense of self. Andrew Epstein, following James Breslin and others, has eloquently explained this concept: O’Hara’s poems are absolutely saturated with the idea that the self is a “being in transience,” as they contemplate its ephemerality and resist fixed encarnations of the self at every turn. He rejects anything that would confine the inherently fluid self into limited categories, definitions, or identities—a survival tactic that is linked to O’Hara’s navigation of the homophobic, repressive cultural environment of the 1950s.17

The beginning of O’Hara’s great poem “In Memory of My Feelings,” for example, evokes a plurality of possible selves, created explicitly out of a need for self-protection: My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals. Frank O ’ Hara ’ s “ Lorcaescas ”  

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My quietness has a number of naked selves, so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons and have murder in their heart!18

If the poetic subject is split into various selves or lives then a passing indulgence in Lorquismo will not permanently determine his identity. O’Hara implicitly treats the Lorcaesque itself as a fluid category rather than as a fixed essence, intuiting, perhaps, that there are several available Lorcas: the Lorca of “crummy ex-jazz hangouts” remains at some distance to the Lorca whose “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” inspired Motherwell to begin his series of paintings Elegy to the Spanish Republic. The Spanish poet himself, we might remember, despised Lorquismo, much as O’Hara came to distrust others’ expectations of how “Frank” was supposed write. The speaker of “Failures of Spring” mentions the possibility of writing an opera based on his lorcaescas, but he immediately rejects the idea for a (seemingly) spurious reason: he doesn’t write operas. (O’Hara could be alluding here to Enrique Granados’s opera Goyescas.) The mention of these texts is intriguing, implying the existence of other O’Hara poems derived from Lorca’s work. Here he seems to be projecting the possibility of these poems rather than referring to an extant text. Although O’Hara is perhaps best known for the first person, autobiographical voice found in poems like “Personal Poem” and “Failures of Spring,” he also experimented throughout his career with various stylistic masks, producing translations, pastiches, adaptations, and homages inspired by other poets and artists—much as Pound did in his Personae. This stylistic experimentation allowed him a variety of tonal registers, from the intimate to the oracular, the sincere to the ironic. A poem or series of poems with the title “lorcaescas,” then, would not have been out of place in O’Hara’s oeuvre. There is a single poem, collected in the posthumous Poems Retrieved, that responds to this description: “Young Girl in Pursuit of Lorca,” a poem that in the manuscript bears the previous crossed-out title “After Lorca” (a title already used, of course, by Creeley and Spicer). This 130 

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poem, like the “Little Elegy for Antonio Machado,” reveals a certain stylistic ambivalence: Without encountering you voyager for whom I have prepared this white torso oh god the air soon my life will be the moon I will be far from horses and arguments and the air will obscure tomorrow delay the wind with lightness and licence I will find the lust of your marshes you will blame me for grass you will eat an armload of my anguish bathe in the dentrifice of my wounds speak truly of the taste let the torrent of my cheap temper-ridden heart become a dove or dope nudes march by in masks whole squadrons pretending to be morphodites doubles of the rocks but full of sweat come to your hips I heave I squander my lips on your perfect kneecaps knowing heaven to be vacant give me your hand your heart your wrist your hair and crystal house your blood-filled stable of rising you alone question your beauty prepare to face it in the air of my being I alone force you to prepare to face your beauty but only value our love, our tantrum of belief more than nothingness19 Frank O ’ Hara ’ s “ Lorcaescas ”  

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This poem is, essentially, a very free, stanza-by-stanza version of Lorca’s “Ruina,” from Poet in New York. The first stanza of Lorca’s poem, for example, is “Sin encontrarse. / Viajero por su propio torso blanco, / ¡Así iba el aire” [Never finding itself, / traveling through its own white torso / the air made its way].20 O’Hara retains key semantic elements (not finding, the traveler, the white torso, the air) but reconfigures them. Where he takes his greatest liberty is with tone. Phrases like “bathe in the dentrifice of my wounds,” “your bloodfilled stable of rising,” “I squander my lips on your perfect kneecaps,” and “our tantrum of belief ” have a self-conscious excess that is lacking in Lorca’s original. The last stanza of “Ruina,” for example, is “Prepara tu esqueleto. / Hay que buscar de prisa, amor, de prisa / nuestro perfil sin sueño” [“Prepare your skeleton. / Hurry, love, hurry, we’ve got to look, / for our sleepless profile”].21 The poem, then, might be taken as a spoof of a certain overblown quality of deep image poetry that was coming into the forefront in the early 1960s, or, more probably, of Ben Belitt’s ornate style of translating Lorca. O’Hara’s poem is written in a kind of exoticizing “translationese.” Compare Belitt’s barely grammatical final stanza to the relatively plain-vanilla version (Simon and White) I have just quoted: “Make ready your skeleton. / Love, hasten, there is left us to hasten [sic]/ the dreamless quest of our profile.”22 O’Hara often pushed against stylistic limits by employing a lush, overtly romantic tone and flirting with a certain sentimental excess. “Young Girl in Search of Lorca” should probably be seen as an attempt to test the limits of O’Hara’s own Lorcaesque style, not as a parody meant to ridicule Belitt’s translation. The title marks the poem as an expression of the stylistic expression of an alternate “self.” The first person speaker of the poem is the “Young Girl” of the title, who speaks in an exaggerated version of O’Hara’s style at its most lush and romantic.

III. Lorca and O’Hara’s Surrealism: “Easter” and “Hatred”

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and “Young Girl In Search of Lorca,” just as he echoes Mayakovsky in “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” and Rilke in “Aus Einem April.”23 This raises the intriguing question of whether there may be other poems in O’Hara’s oeuvre that echo Lorca without making explicit reference to the Spanish poet. How much does his socalled surrealist poetry of the early 1950s, for example, owe to Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York? Most critics have associated O’Hara’s surrealist style exclusively with French sources. O’Hara’s Francophilia is not open to question. He concludes “Personal Poem” with the lines: “My heart is in my / pocket. It is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.”24 When W. H. Auden criticized the surrealist leanings of both Ashbery and O’Hara, the latter wrote: “I don’t care what Wystan says, I would rather be dead than not have France around my neck like a rhinestone dog-collar.”25 But O’Hara, much like his friend Kenneth Koch, was an eclectic poet, taking inspiration from multiple sources foreign and domestic, including the classic Noh theater of Japan, Rilke, modern Russian poetry (Pasternak and Mayakovsky), and the surrealist-inspired francophone poetry of “négritude” (Césaire, Senghor). Lorca was certainly a significant part of this eclectic mix for O’Hara, just as he was for Koch.26 To measure Lorca’s presence in O’Hara’s work, then, it is necessary to reexamine our received ideas about O’Hara’s literary background, about Lorca’s poetry, and about what American poetry influenced by Lorca ought to look like. Certain stereotypical notions about French surrealism and its influence on American poetry also come into play. Is our notion of French surrealism based on stock notions of “automatic writing” or on the full range of writing by French surrealist poets, many of whom had not been extensively translated into English when O’Hara was writing his early poems? What particular aspects of Lorca’s work, which specific poems, provide the basis of the comparison? What role does the mediation of translation play, both in the original impact of the foreign-language poet and in our comparison of texts? Kenneth Koch, a close friend and collaborator of Frank O’Hara, brings Lorca’s name into a discussion of “Easter,” a poem dating from 1952: “Another of his works which burst on us all like a bomb then was Frank O ’ Hara ’ s “ Lorcaescas ”  

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‘Easter,’ a wonderful, energetic, and rather obscene poem of four or five pages, which consisted mainly of a procession of bodily parts and other objects across a vast landscape. It was like Lorca and Whitman in some ways, but very original.”27 Perloff is a bit skeptical of this characterization: “The claim for Whitman and Lorca may be somewhat exaggerated because ‘Easter’ is still, predominantly, a third person impersonal poem, lacking the bardic intensity of these two poets.”28 Koch’s citation of Lorca, however, cannot be easily dismissed, since Koch himself was experimenting with a similar style in the early 1950s. If “Easter” reminded Koch of Lorca, could this be because his own poetry of the 1950s, written in a similar mode, was “Lorcaesque” in some ways as well? Koch first published his “Note on Frank O’Hara in the 1950s” in 1964, so it is difficult to determine whether he actually thought of Lorca in connection with “Easter” when he first read the poem twelve years earlier. All the same, it is significant that Koch compares O’Hara to Whitman and Lorca, rather than to Breton or Eluard. While not a “personal” poem like the later “A Step Way from Them,” or “Personal Poem” itself, “Easter” is not, strictly speaking, “impersonal”; nor is it written entirely in the grammatical third person: “It’s night like I love it all cruisy and nelly,” “I have sunk my tongue in the desperation of her blood.”29 Despite what the usually reliable Perloff says, O’Hara’s tone is indeed intensely charged and “bardic” in a way that can be plausibly compared to Lorca if not to Whitman: When the world strips down and rouges up like a matress’s teeth brushed by love’s bristling sun a marvelous heart tiresomely got up in brisk bold stares a self-coral serpent wrapped round an arm with no jujubes without swish without camp floods of crocodile piss and pleasures of driving30

Such lines would be out of place in the Oeuvres complètes of André Breton. The militantly heterosexual founder of surrealism would not have need to negotiate the boundaries of gay identity as O’Hara does here (“without swish / without camp”). The scattering of body parts, 134 

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animals, and miscellaneous objects across an unmistakably American landscape, on the other hand, might be compared to the dream landscape of Lorca’s “Paisaje de la multitud que orina”: ¡La luna! Los policías. ¡Las sirenas de los transatlánticos! Fachadas de orín, de humo, anémonas, guantes de goma. Todo está roto por la noche, abierta de piernas sobre las terrazas. Todo está roto por los tibios caños de una terrible fuente silenciosa. ¡Oh gentes! ¡Oh mujercillas! ¡Oh soldados! Será preciso viajar por los ojos de los idiotas, campos libres donde silban las mansas cobras deslumbradas, paisajes llenos de sepulcros que producen fresquísimas manzanas, para que venga la luz desmedida que temen los ricos detrás de sus lupas, el olor de un solo cuerpo con la doble vertiente de lis y rata y para que se quemen estas gentes que pueden orinar alrededor de un gemido o en los cristales donde se comprenden las olas nunca repetidas.31 •  •  •

Moons! Policemen! Sirens of transatlantic ships! Façades of piss, of smoke and anenomes, rubber gloves! Everything is broken in the night, the night with her legs spread out on terraces, everything is broken in the lukewarm pipes of a horrid silent fountain. Oh people! Little wives! soldiers! You’ll need to travel through idiot eyes, open fields where tame, dazzled cobras whistle, landscapes full of sepulchres that produce fresh apples so that the measureless light can come feared by the rich behind their magnifying glasses, the smell of a single body with its two sides of iris and rat, and so that these people may fry who are capable of pissing around a groan or into goblets where the never repeated waves are understood.32 Frank O ’ Hara ’ s “ Lorcaescas ”  

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Lorca’s apocalyptic imagery and overblown tone also find echo in “Hatred,” another O’Hara poem from 1952. The first three stanzas provide a representative sample of O’Hara’s approach: I have a terrible age and I part my name at the seam of the beast in a country of robbers who prepare meals for a velvet church green with stammerers and with cuckoos, with cormorants and cranes. I’ve tucked the rushing earth under my legs so I won’t have to turn my back on Sundays and the morasses of ritual archers milking, and I eat in a prison of bread and mortar, I eat the stuff with the wooden provocations. But if I’d broken you one of my wings, that darkening over the prairie of your soul, for the sea’s split resistance I’d never snout. I’d retch up all men, I would give up America and her twenty twistings of my years.33

The first person speaking voice is oracular and bombastic, indulging in a violent, overdramatized rejection of his time and place: he lives in “a terrible age” and “a country of robbers.” The tone is anguished throughout: O’Hara’s biographer notes that “the poems’ surrealist images [.  .  .] are kept moving by a grinding revelation of underlying pain, the pain of being compulsively pursued as in a nightmare.”34 The images of menace, violence, turbulent sexuality, and disgust in both “Easter” and “Hatred” can be somewhat hard to take. While powerful in their expression, these poems have never been critical favorites.35 Many readers prefer the more colloquial, “personal” style of Lunch Poems and the “I do this / I do that mode” to O’Hara early “surrealist” mode. John Ashbery appears to be uncomfortable with the agressivity of O’Hara’s stylistic experimentation: “It is true that much of Frank’s early work was not only provocative but provoking. One frequently feels that the poet is trying on various pairs of brass knuck136 

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les until he finds the one that fits comfortably.”36 Ashbery prefers the “vernacular” mode that produced O’Hara’s mature work of the midfif­ ties onward. Perloff develops this argument at greater length, arguing, quite convincingly to my mind, that in order to write the justly famous poems of the late 1950s, O’Hara needed to combine the surrealism of his early work with a more colloquial style inspired by William Carlos Williams and others.37 We don’t normally think of O’Hara as a provocative countercultural figure comparable to Allen Ginsberg, whose book Howl and Other Poems of 1957 was the subject of a famous obscenity trial in San Francisco. Nevertheless, I think the comparison is an appropriate one. Ginsberg was already at work on the poem “Howl” in the early fifties, during the same period when O’Hara was experimenting with the surrealist mode. Gooch describes the initial reaction to a public reading of “Easter” in 1952 in rather dramatic terms: O’Hara’s effect on the understatedly elegant audience was a bit strong. “I hated it—the violence of the language scared me to death,” recalled Elmslie. . . . One of the most shocked was Jackson Pollock’s dealer, Betty Parsons. “Afterward Betty Parsons was saying, ‘I don’t know why I’ve been invited to hear this, I don’t know why I have to hear this,’” recalls Schuyler. . . . Particular exception was taken by Parsons to a line about “women who use cigars.”38

O’Hara’s public reading of “Easter” occurred only three years before the famous “Six Gallery Reading” in San Francisco at which Ginsberg first presented “Howl” to the public. (In Ginsberg’s own account of this reading, he explicitly compares himself to Lorca, whom he had been reading in the summer of 1955.) The reaction of the New York audience to O’Hara’s reading “Easter” is revealing in that it shows how Ginsberg’s “Howl” might have been received in similar circumstances. Neither “Easter” nor “Hatred” had the wider poetic or cultural impact of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which is surely the most famous poem written in the United States in the postwar period. (In fact, “Hatred” did not appear in print during O’Hara’s lifetime.) O’Hara, considered to be an Frank O ’ Hara ’ s “ Lorcaescas ”  

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apolitical art-world figure rather than a bardic poet in the WhitmanLorca-Ginsberg mold, would make his mark in other ways. Still, his early poetry arises out of a kindred impulse in early 1950s American culture. Ginsberg and O’Hara, despite belonging to different movements within The New American Poetry, were in fact personal friends who admired each other’s work. As noted in chapter 2, O’Hara also shared Ginsberg’s admiration for Vladimir Mayakovsky. O’Hara’s “Hatred” and “Easter” predate the major influx of Lorca into American poetry, which occurred after the Ben Belitt translation of Poet in New York and the Francisco García Lorca/Donald Allen New Directions Selected Poems, both published in 1955. Lorquismo in American poetry—Spicer’s After Lorca, O’Hara’s “Failures of Spring” and “Young Girl in Search of Lorca,” the invention of deep image poetry, Ginsberg’s “Supermarket in California” and “Van Gogh’s Ear”—is most heavily concentrated in the period stretching from about 1957 to 1961. Given O’Hara’s pronounced Francophilia, it seems much more natural to associate his early surrealist mode with the French-language sources that Perloff has adduced. Yet Lorca’s New York poetry would also have been present for O’Hara. At the very least, Lorca is a plausible source for the apocalyptic and violent tone of “Hatred,” if not for the more precious surrealist mode of “Oranges.” O’Hara would later return to a more oracular voice in poems like “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets”: From near the sea, like Whitman my great predecessor, I call to the spirits of other lands to make fecund my existence do not spare your wrath upon our shores, that trees may grow upon the sea, mirror of our total mankind in the weather39

To address the poets of the négritude movement, in particular Aimé Césaire, O’Hara claims Whitman as his key precursor. While I have no evidence to suggest that O’Hara was thinking specifically of Lorca’s “Ode to Walt Whitman” here, his bardic invocation of “the spirits of other lands” situates him within a poetic tradition that includes Whitman, Mayakovsky, Lorca, Neruda, and Ginsberg, along with the “French Negro Poets” themselves. The hallmark of this mode is a man138 

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tic, larger-than-life voice, a poetic “I” that speaks on behalf of a collective but without losing its uniquely personal voice. The oracular mode found in O’Hara’s “Hatred,” “Easter,” and “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets” complicates a longstanding critical commonplace: the binary opposition between the New York school, influenced, primarily, by French surrealism, and the deep image poets who draw inspiration from Spanish and Latin American poetry. This opposition relies upon the hoary ideological division between brain and heart, intellect and passion: the New York poets, in this view, are cold and cerebral, emotionally detached and somewhat frivolous, whereas the deep image poets are passionate, earnest, and receptive to chthonic and telluric influences. French surrealism itself, according to Bly, suffers from a lack of depth: Yes, I’ve always thought that Spanish surrealism was deeper than French surrealism. In America we only know French surrealism through Breton and poets of that sort. So our vision of surrealism is very distorted. It hasn’t been until recently, for example, that we’ve looked at the work of Vicente Aleixandre. The Poet in New York is very badly translated, so Spanish surrealism is still basically unknown to us. But when you compare the two, it seems evident that French surrealism comes more from the false unconscious. Breton in many of his images definitely reaches down and touches something else, something absolutely genuine. Many surrealists who follow him do not. Their rational school education has been so powerful, and their sense of landscape so weak, that when they reach inside, two out of three images will be recreated by their actual mind imitating the unconscious.40

The French, apparently, are destined to be Cartesian rationalists, even in their surrealism. Stereotypes of national characters, while rooted in the questionable assumptions of the romantic period, die hard: even very well-educated people hold certain ideas about staid En­ glishmen, passionate Italians, and sensual Brazilians. Ironically, Bly’s judgment about the relative depth of French and Spanish surrealism is itself hubristically shallow, based as it is on an unsupported generalization about “many surrealists” and their supposedly weak “sense of landscape.” Nevertheless, it echoes a view held by some Spanish Frank O ’ Hara ’ s “ Lorcaescas ”  

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poets and critics, who tend to privilege less doctrinaire surrealistinfluenced poetry written in Spanish (Lorca, Aleixandre, Cernuda) over French surrealism itself. The Catalan poet Joan Brossa, for example, writes that “Gracias a poetas como él se ha podido constatar con los años que las obras de los surrealistas peninsulares superan las de los franceses, tan dados a las teorías y las pelucas.”41 [Thanks to poets like him {Lorca} the years have confirmed that the works of Peninsular surrealists are superior to those of the French, so given to theories and wigs.] It is not in dispute that Lorca is a stronger poet than many minor French surrealists, but statements like that of Brossa rely too heavily on the unexamined cultural stereotype of the overtheoretical Frenchman. Like other similar clichés, the opposition between a French and a Spanish mode in postwar American poetry does have some basis in reality. Bly and Wright were generally hostile to the urbane and ironic mode of the New York poets. Both groups of poets were receptive to a wide spectrum of influences from Europe and the Americas, but they had differing views of these literary traditions. Bly and Wright transposed imagery from Spanish-language poetry onto a midwestern landscape (Bly’s Minnesota, Wright’s Southern Ohio). Koch and O’Hara, in contrast, would have seen Lorca as part of a more cosmopolitan landscape: the New York of André Breton, Joseph Cornell, and Lorca himself. There is no particularly good reason, in my view, to privilege Bly’s Midwestern Lorca over other, more cosmopolitan versions of the American Lorcas. As we saw in chapter 4, the deep image mode, whether in Wright, Bly, Rothenberg, or Wakoski, is a homegrown product with relatively shallow roots in Spanish language poetry. None of the key elements of Bly’s poetics—the distrust of metrical form, poetic craft, and intellectual self-awareness; the fetishization of the unconscious mind (seen in Jungian terms); the “elemental” lexicon of stone, dark, deep, wound—is Lorquian in any meaningful sense. If we look at the figure of Lorca through the lens provided by Robert Bly, of course, then we are likely to see a poet given to intuitive metaphorical “leaps,” a Spanish surrealist whose resonant images provided a needed antidote to the 140 

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“objective” depiction of reality in William Carlos Williams. The choice of this particular interpretive framework, however, is an arbitrary one. I suggest, as a kind of thought experiment, a shift of frameworks that would bring to light the kinship between Lorca and O’Hara: •

•

•

•

•

Both were gay poets and playwrights with an emotionally fraught relationship to the Catholicism of their upbringing, “a velvet church green with stammerers.” Both had the musical talent that would have made them professional pianists, had they chosen that path. They each experimented relentlessly with a wide gamut of poetic voices, tones, and forms, writing sonnets, odes, prosepoems, avant-garde plays, and long lines of bardic free verse inspired by Walt Whitman. Both poets drew on this stylistic variety in order to construct a plural sense of the self and of the poetic voice itself, in a complex negotiation between an intimate, personal voice and more public discourses. Lorca and O’Hara distrusted false or simplified images of themselves, reductions of the self to a univocal signifier. Both stood at the center of the vibrant avant-garde scene of their respective epochs. Influenced by French surrealism, neither was a member of the surrealist movement itself. Lorca’s intense friendship with Salvador Dalí finds echo in O’Hara’s relationship to painters like Larry Rivers. A sympathy for African American experience is evident in Poeta en Nueva York and in O’Hara poems like “Answer to Voznesensky & Evtsushenko,” where the American poet protests against the Soviet poets’ “dreary tourist ideas of our Negro selves.”42 Both poets introduce elements of “camp” into an elegiac mode. Lorca has a swaggering angel (un ángel marchoso) place a pillow under the head of the dying Antoñito el Camborio.43 His glamourization of the death of the over-the-hill bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías anticipates O’Hara’s elegies for Billie Holiday, James Dean, and Antonio Machado.

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•

Both Lorca and O’Hara were charismatic, larger-than-life figures who forged powerful and resonant personae. Both have become mythic figures after their premature deaths, inspiring countless elegies.

In compiling this admittedly tendentious list of points of convergence between Lorca and O’Hara, I have perhaps fallen victim to a certain confirmatory bias, eliding some obvious differences. Although both were charismatic, larger-than-life figures, O’Hara’s theater of operations was considerably smaller. Lorca drew on popular and folkloric traditions and became a symbol of regional (Andalusian) and national (Spanish) identity. O’Hara, uninterested in folklore, was a coterie poet who never aspired to become this sort of “representative” figure, although his championing of popular culture makes him an early representative of a particular brand of American postmodernism that would eventually become extremely influential. Despite these differences, my own feeling is that O’Hara is a more “Lorquian” figure than either Robert Bly or James Wright. He belongs, in at least one or two facets of his work, to the tradition of bardic, charismatic twentieth-century figures like Mayakovsky, Lorca, and Ginsberg. This connection may be just as arbitrary as the conventional linking of Lorca to the deep image poets. The choice of interpretive frameworks is not natural or given, and literary traditions are always somewhat arbitrary, constructed after the fact in a selective process. At the very least, though, an exploration of O’Hara’s Lorquismo has a heuristic value, showing that the divisions between rival schools of contemporary American poetry are not as clearcut as they might appear.

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7 Kenneth Koch Parody and Pedagogy Who are the great poets of our time, and what are their names? Yeats of the baleful influence, Auden of the baleful influence, Eliot of the baleful influence (Is Eliot a great poet? no one knows), Hardy, Stevens, Williams, (is Hardy of our time?), Hopkins (is Hopkins of our time?), Rilke (is Rilke of our time?), Lorca (is Lorca of our time?), who is still of our time? Mallarmé, Valéry, Apollinaire, Eluard, Reverdy, French poets are still of our time, Pasternak and Mayakovsky, is Jouve of our time? Kenneth Koch, “Fresh Air”1 Life in the work? It is as if two orchestras Played separately and simultaneously— One from inside, deep down, where García Lorca says Duende dwells, which sometimes intravenously Gets fed by that outside—thus metamorphosis! Koch, “Seasons on Earth”2

I. Koch’s France / Koch’s Lorca

Like Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch (1925–2002) is a poet strongly identified with French literature. He lived for a year in France in the early 1950s and admired nineteenth- and twentiethcentury poets from Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud through Roussel, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Jacob, Breton, Reverdy, Perse, Eluard, Char, and Deguy—to mention only some of those who appear by name in his poems, essays, and interviews. His PhD dissertation 143

was on The Reception and Influence of American Poetry in France, 1918– 1950. For Koch, there is no question but that “French poets are of our time,” even those of the nineteenth century. His interest in Spanish poetry, in contrast, is limited to a single figure: Federico García Lorca. This one figure, nevertheless, shows up more often in his prose and verse than almost any single French poet, with the possible exception of Raymond Roussel. Lorca, along with Shelley and a very few others, is part of Koch’s poetic pantheon: When I get to thinking, “Well my poetry’s fine, and a lot of what I’m reading in magazines is fine,” then I happen to come across a poem by Lorca, such as “Landscape of the Urinating Multitudes,” all is changed. There’s a little bit of great poetry in the world which is astonishingly beautiful. And, finally, I suppose I think that is the only poetry that matters, poetry that is, in Frank O’Hara’s phrase, a “reminder of immortal energy.”3

There is a peculiar asymmetry, then, between Koch’s broad knowledge of French literary traditions and his devotion to a single poet from modern Spain. We have seen a similar pattern in many of his contemporaries: for Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg, Creeley, Rothenberg, and Wakoski, Lorca is Spanish poetry and Spanish poetry is Lorca.4 Even U.S. poets acquainted with an expanded canon of Spanish poetry in translation tend to privilege Lorca. The practical effect is that Lorca is typically read out of context, as an American transplant rather than as a representative of his own national literature. If, as we have seen, the deep image school owes much less to Spanish and Spanish-American poetry than we have been led to expect, it is equally possible that O’Hara and Koch are a bit more Lorquian: just as we find André Breton accompanying the birth of deep image poetry, we find Lorca to be a stronger than expected presence among poets of the New York school. The split between the influence of French and Spanish varieties of “surrrealism” fails to materialize in a predictable way. It might be helpful, then, to look at Koch’s actual view of French 144 

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poetry, and in particulary the surrealist movement, before turning to the question of his Lorquismo. Like his close friend Frank O’Hara, Koch was directly inspired by surrealism in the early 1950s, when he wrote the zany poems of Sun Out (which remained uncollected in book form until near the end of Koch’s life) and the long poem When the Sun Tries to Go On, but he moved away from this style in his subsequent work, beginning with early books like Ko: A Season on Earth (1959) and Thank You and Other Poems (1962). Koch’s early poetry is roughly comparable in style to O’Hara’s “Oranges,” “Second Avenue,” and “Easter,” although Koch tends toward excitable exuberance and O’Hara toward indignant denunciation. Both poets subsequently move toward a more colloquial style, leaving behind their initial “surrealist” style in parallel fashion. Koch’s mature poetry has a strong communicative drive: he is fairly unusual among poets of his time in his open dislike of verbal ambiguity. In his 1972 interview with David Shapiro Koch expressed his admiration for anonymous medieval plays in the following terms: “And then I had always liked the old miracle and morality plays in which no word has any ambiguity at all. I don’t like ambiguity. I suppose it’s all right if the ambiguous things a work means are interesting and exciting, but often they’re not.”5 Needless to say, this position puts Koch at odds with the dense symbolism and the layers of verbal ambiguity that dominated the so-called academic poetry of the 1940s and 1950s, a poetry written expressly, as some would argue, to be the object of New Critical analysis in the classroom. (This is the poetry written under the “baleful influence” of Yeats, Eliot, and Auden.) What is more, it also distances him from modes of linguistic complexity and postmodern indeterminacy seen in John Ashbery or Susan Howe. The deconstructive mode of criticism that supplanted New Criticism in the United States during the 1980s places an even higher premium on ambiguity and indeterminacy: this might explain why Koch has never been the favorite of English Departments.6 Given Koch’s distrust of verbal ambiguity, one might also expect him to be attracted to those tendencies within French poetry that Kenneth Koch: Parody and Pedagogy 

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highlight acts of conscious attentiveness, rather than to the dreamlike states associated with orthodox surrealism. He did admire Eluard and Breton, of course, but I believe his strongest affinities lie with some of the precursors of the surrealist movement, like Reverdy, Apollinaire, and Roussel, poets who are often more interested in surfaces than in the murky depths of the unconscious. Roussel’s flat, unambiguous visual descriptions in La Vue and La Source, for example, find echo in Koch’s “The Railway Stationery.” Koch’s early “surrealist” poems show him playing with the sounds of words and establishing zany, comic connections between them, rather than plumbing psychic depths. The poem “Sun Out,” the title poem of his posthumous collection of the early work, begins like this: Bananas, piers, limericks I am postures Over there, I, are The lakes of delectation Sea, sea you! Mars and winsome buffalo They thinly raft the plain, Common do7

Such writing is closer to North American “language poetry” (which did not yet exist in the early 1950s, of course) than to classic French surrealism, which did not promote syntactic fragmentation. In any case, this was not the main line of inquiry that Koch would pursue in his mature work. In a brief introduction to Clayton Eshleman’s translation of the eclectic contemporary poet Michel Deguy, Koch offers this telling judgment on the limitations of classic French surrealism: One can guess what might have seemed wrong, in the 1950s, with that poetry: its leaving out so much, its idealizing, its blurriness, its seeming enclosed, too special, too ecstatic, too sure of its own rhetorical powers. The unconscious, which seemed, and was, such a grand escape from unreality, boredom, and sameness, could end up being a cause of them.8 146 

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These words undoubtedly reflect Koch’s own suspicion of the surrealist sacralization of the unconscious. It is not that Koch necessarily distrusted the imagery from unconscious sources, but that he wanted a more open and eclectic approach: Rather than choosing one strand, or line, of poetic subject matter and style, as have some of his talented contemporaries (Du Bouchet and Bonnefoy, for example), Deguy seems to me to stay in the center, as if he were unwilling to miss anything, didn’t want to give anything up, not any of the life or any of the “old privileges” of the poet: being able to rhyme, to tell stories, to write long poems, to mix poetry and prose, to be precise and intellectual, to be ecstatic and lyrical, to write about anything he wants.9

This is the approach taken by Koch himself, who composed comic epics in ottava rima (Ko, The Duplications), travelogues mixing poetry and prose (“Reflections on Morocco,” “Impressions of Africa”), and didactic poetry in the Horatian mode (The Art of Love)—without neglecting intellectual, ecstatic, and lyrical modes. Federico García Lorca occupies a peculiar place within this exuberantly eclectic vision of modern poetry. Koch first approaches the Spanish poet through a parodic hoax that, like Spicer’s After Lorca, entails the translation of apocryphal poems. Lorca also appears prominently as a model to be imitated in Koch’s innovative pedagogical texts. In both cases the Lorquian model produces an English-language poetry that plays with received ideas about “Spanish” poetry and culture. Unlike deep image poets, Koch does not make an earnest attempt to capture the dark resonance of the duende. Nevertheless, he remains committed to the poetics of “immortal energy” glimpsed in Lorca’s poetry. II. “Some South American Poets”: Between Lorca and Borges

The parody-homage “Some South American Poets” first appeared in Kenneth Koch’s 1969 book The Pleasures of Peace.10 It consists of a brief anthology of poems and short prose pieces by several apocryphal Argentine poets, with improbably sounding names like “Guinhieme,” Kenneth Koch: Parody and Pedagogy 

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“Omero Pecad,” and “García San Baz.”11 At the center of “Some South American Poets” is the concept of the hasos, the “art of the fallen limb,” or “the art of concealing in one line what has been revealed in the previous line.”12 The apocryphal Argentine poet named “Guinhieme” offers a longwinded and overbearing “clarification” of this concept: Younger practitioners and, above all, explicators of the hasosismo have often made the error of seeing this function as the reverse of what it actually is: the revelation in one line of what was concealed in the preceding—or, the concealing in one line of what is to be revealed in the next. This is not hasosismo: this is fancy and the commonest and most ordinary of poetic processes. HASOSISMO IS THE MYSTERY OF NIGHT COVERED BY THE DAY; IT IS NOT THE DAY, WHICH IS REVEALED AFTER BEING HIDDEN IN THE NIGHT.13

I agree with Jordan Davis, who was Koch’s editorial assistant during the 1990s, that the hasos is, to some extent at least, a parody of the concept of Lorca’s duende. Davis juxtaposes the passage I have just quoted with this excerpt from Lorca’s essay: The duende, then, is a power and not a construct, is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old guitarist, a true virtuoso, remark, “The duende is not in the throat, the duende comes up from inside, up from the very soles of the feet.” That is to say, it is not a question of aptitude, but of a true and viable style—of blood, in other words; of what is oldest in culture: of creation made act.14

Guinhieme’s essay also echoes Lorca’s concern for authenticity: “San Baz has hasosismo; Cediz does not. Juanero is a million miles from having it. In Santorje it is supreme.”15 Lorca refers to the duende, in a similar vein, as a guarantor of a certain lack of artifice: The great artists of southern Spain [. . .] know that no emotion is possible without the mediation of the Duende. They may hoodwink the people, they may give the illusion of duende without really having it, just as writers and painters and literary fashion-mongers without duende cheat you daily; but it needs only a little care and the will to re148 

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sist one’s own indifference, to discover the imposture and put its crude artifice to flight.16

The duende has long been the dominant meme through which Spanish language poetry is processed in the English-speaking world, especially the United States. Lorca’s duende article is the only piece by a “foreign” writer in anthologies like The Poetics of the New American Poetry. It would make sense, then, to choose this concept as the object of a spoof. Nonetheless, the hasos might also be read as a parody of the “deep image,” given the emphasis on revelation and concealment, light and dark. The hasos, in practice, turns out to be a particular configuration of the surrealist image, the revelation of a previously concealed psychic depth. Actual examples of the hasos are hard to define, especially since the concept is already a problematic and contested one within Koch’s fictive Argentina.17 Guinhieme offers several illustrations: “The streets of the city are shining, wet with light / In the dark and dry forgetfulness of rivers” or “You give me your hand; it is white with pointed / Forests accepting the horizon”18 But in what sense does the second line of each couplet conceal an image already revealed in the first? Since the second line, by definition, must cover up the first, almost any logical non sequitur or metaphorical leap might qualify as hasos. What is more, if the two lines are metaphorical equivalents of each other, then in many cases it seems arbitrary to say which line does the revealing and which the concealing. What is the point, anyway, of concealing something that is already out in the open? The hasos is a bit counterintuitive in this respect, since it fights against the more natural tendency, in riddles for example, to move from obscurity to clarity (a commonplace poetic device, as Guinhieme points out). It is probably beside the point, though, to overthink the theoretical definition of a concept meant to be parodic in the first place. One obvious objection to seeing Koch’s hasos as a parodic reflection of Lorca’s duende is that he situates his imaginary poets in Argentina rather than in Lorca’s Spain. The concept of the duende, needless to say, has little or no application to Latin American poetry, or, in fact, Kenneth Koch: Parody and Pedagogy 

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to Spanish poets other than Lorca himself. There are several possible explanations for Koch’s transplantation of the concept from Spain to Argentina. American readers often fail to mark the distinction between Spanish and Spanish-American poetry in the first place. Since the duende is associated with Lorca, and Lorca is linked in the popular imagination to Pablo Neruda and the concept of a pan-Hispanic surrealism, the duende has taken on a broader meaning for most Anglophone readers. In a similar way, the scope of “Spanish surrealism” in the popular imagination has been extended to refer to poets who were indifferent or even hostile to surrealism, like Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez. Koch further blurs the distinction between Spain and Latin America by placing a few Spanish (and specifically Lorquian) references in texts signed by his South American poets. There are, however, some even more specific reasons why Koch chose Argentina, rather than another Latin American nation. No Argentine poet was a model for the creation of deep image poetry or the propagation of “Spanish surrealism,” so it could be that Argentina provided Koch with a blank slate on which to invent his apocryphal poets. Koch probably knew, too, that Lorca first gave his famous lecture on the duende in Buenos Aires, since Ben Belitt provided this information when he published the first translation of Lorca’s essay into English in 1955. The most plausible explanation, however, is that Koch was thinking specifically of Jorge Luis Borges, who was perhaps the only Argentine poet whose works were at all well known in the United States during the 1960s. Borges was better known for his prose: his poetry was never part of the deep image constellation. He was too devoted to rhyme and meter, too much of an Anglophile, and too hostile to the avant-garde movements of his own youth to have inspired poets like Rothenberg, Merwin, or Bly.19 Borges, incidentally, had an unfavorable reaction to Lorca’s visit to Argentina, concluding that the Spanish poet was a “professional Andalusian.”20 Koch, however, was favorably inclined toward both Lorca and Borges. Jordan Davis notes that “materials among Koch’s papers at the New York Public Library’s 150 

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Berg Collection indicate that Koch had begun work by 1966 on poems by fictitious poets loosely modeled after Jorge Luis Borges.”21 There are, in fact, a few hints of Borges in Koch’s parody. A book by one of his imaginary poets is The Streets of Buenos Aires, a title reminiscent of Borges’s early book of ultraísta poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires. What is more, Koch’s parody is an excellent illustration of Borges’s idea that it is more efficient to write commentaries on nonexistent books than to write the books themselves: The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then offer a résumé, a commentary.22

Following a similarly parsimonious method, Koch allows fifteen pages of apocryphal Argentine poetry and prose commentary to stand in for a much larger apocryphal tradition, complete with its own history and controversies. He uses a Borgesian device, in others words, to parody a Lorquian concept, the duende, which was fast becoming a cliché in American poetry. The flavor of Koch’s parody is manifest in “Madame,” one of the more overtly comical texts in “Some South American Poets”: I look at you. Oceans of beer gush from the left side of my collar bone And down my sides, until they form a crystal pool at my feet In which children are swimming. I push them back and to one side. Perhaps to love you only it was given To me, lady beyond many sorrows. Perhaps you are not of the mistresses of García Or of Streets Which Are Waving Goodbye. But I love you. Straw sailors Come out of my brow. They coast in that fresh sea sky.23

There is a freewheeling, overblown quality to this imagery that is somewhat reminiscent of Ben Belitt’s translations of Lorca and Neruda. The garbled syntax and unidiomatic pharsing of “to love you only it was given / To me” and “you are not of the mistresses of García” sound like Kenneth Koch: Parody and Pedagogy 

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comically inept literal translations from the Spanish. This zany, lighthearted tone contrasts with the melancholy that we observed in Frank O’Hara’s “Young Girl in Search of Lorca,” discussed in the previous chapter, which falls short of being an outright parody. The name García, found here in “Madame,” occurs repeatedly in “Some South American Poets.” There are also a few other specifically Lorquian references in Koch’s South Americans—to “Sevilla” and the “Civil Guard” in Guinhieme’s poem “Boiling Water,” for example.24 “Plaint,” signed by “Juan García,” appears to be a direct parody of a certain Lorcaesque mode: O rolling mountains of my native fascist unconscious mother! O divine transcendence of some future impassioned stream! When the souls of the billionaires shall lie streaming in the bloodshed Banknotes of a whorish fantasma, whose plucked grace notes the hideous transactor no longer Imbues with the maleficent horror of death’s magnificent scream! What, O rolling mountains whose fascist resistances Strikes against the mutinied hearts of mothers, of orphans, of knees Of silence, what are your invocations, to me, and to my mother poets, What emblems do you carry for us? When shall we strike the dollaro from the hideous mustang of our homes?25

The awkwardness of the wording here (consider, for example, the final two lines of the first stanza) is reminiscent of Belitt’s ornate and unidiomatic style, in which a bit of obscure verbiage often conceals a fairly straightforward Spanish phrase. Indeed, the concept of hasos itself serves quite aptly as a metaphor for this mode of translation: an obscurantist version might exemplify the art of concealing in the translation what has been revealed in the original text. In Belitt’s hands, for example, Lorca’s line “Pero el dolor verdadero estaba en otras plazas” [But true pain/sorrow was in other plazas] becomes “But woe absolute was always a village square distant.”26 A reader with even a minimal knowledge of Spanish would have an easier time understanding the original than making sense of this particular English rendering. One of the targets of Koch’s parody, then, is stylistic. Another di152 

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mension of his satire is thematic and rhetorical: “Plaint” is a good example of the overblown oracular mode often seen in translations of Neruda, Hernández, and Lorca—and to some extent in the original texts themselves. The mixture of attacks on Fascism and capitalism with appeals to the “unconscious,” death, and a vague spirituality (“O divine transcendence”) perfectly captures a certain cultural stereotype of “Spanish poetry” as it was defined in the late 1960s. Koch includes similar political references elsewhere in “Some South American Poets”: “Whom do they praise now? / Francisco Franco! / Demagogues and popes?” “See now in Nueva York this Morgan Library / Spattered by the mutual funds of her bloody night.”27 References to “Nueva York,” to “banknotes,” “billionaires,” and “mutual funds,” are more or less direct references to the anticapitalism and urban alienation of Lorca’s Poet in New York. Koch’s parodies are often free of satire, in that they leave our ad­mira­ tion for his ostensible “targets” undisturbed: he tended to parody poets he admired a great deal, like Raymond Roussel, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and William Carlos Williams, rather than attacking those he disliked. Some might conclude that these comic visions of oceans of beer spilling from collarbones and mountains of native fascist mothers have a bit more of a satiric bite than is usual in Koch’s parodies. The parody in “Some South American Poets” is, however, mostly good-humored rather than satirically biting. In some cases, these apocryphal poets write like Argentine avatars of Kenneth Koch himself, echoing the erotic whimsy of his 1962 collection Thank You and Other Poems. Here is the second section of “In Love With You,” from this earlier book: We walk through the park in the sun, and you say, “There’s a spider Of shadow touching the bench, and morning’s begun.” I love you. I love you fame I love you raining sun I love you cigarettes I love you love I love you daggers I love smiles daggers and symbolism.28

Koch’s “spider / Of shadow” could be a “deep image” right out of Rothenberg’s White Sun Black Sun. The poem “BESOS” by Luis Cariges, on the other hand, could easily be confused with a poem by Kenneth Koch himself: Kenneth Koch: Parody and Pedagogy 

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My mouth, a cascade of kisses! And purely below me, your mouth too, An equal cascade of remembrance, farms of bliss, Evidence, preoccupation, evening stars, truly, reversing our tables, When, at dusk, we reform Trees to their original grandeur, As nude as each other’s stars.29

Since “Some South American Poets” itself appears as one poem among others in the table of contents of The Pleasures of Peace, it might be read simply as a logical extension of his own poetic project rather than as a critique of a rival poetic school. The effect would have been different, perhaps, if Koch’s parody had been published as a stand-alone volume, or if it had been a more concerted attempt at a deceptive hoax. Koch’s imaginary Argentine poets have a wit and joie de vivre lacking in Bly’s more solemn—not to say humorless—version of “Spanish Surrealism.” This book is what midcentury American translations of Spanish surrealism would look like, perhaps, with a few extra ingredients: Borgesian metafiction and Koch’s own comic exuberance. His hoax projects a specifically American image of Spanish-language poetry back onto a fictional Argentine landscape. His parody is complex and multilayered, combining Lorca, Borges, and the deep image poets with the exuberance of his own poetry. III. Parody, Pedagogy, and the Poetics of Translation

“Some South American Poets” marks a significant moment in the reception of Spanish-language poetry in the United States. To function effectively, parody requires that its target be recognizable—a mental image or stereotype already in the mind of the reader. By 1969, the publication date of The Pleasures of Peace, the vogue for translating from the Spanish had gained enough visibility to become the legitimate target of parody.30 Koch is not parodying Hernández and Lorca themselves, but rather a cultural stereotype that arose in the United States in the 1960s, based on a highly selective and biased view of Spanish-language poetry. Koch was already an admirer of Lorca be154 

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fore the emergence, and subsequent expansion, of deep image school poetry in the 1960s. During the second half of the 1950s, many American poets were reading Lorca quite intensely, but the “Lorca cliché” was not yet firmly established. Koch probably felt some measure of irritation with the emergence of this stereotype. It is safe to assume that he wanted to mark his distance from the strident and simplistic ideas of Bly. Nor was Bly himself a great admirer of Koch, Ashbery, or O’Hara: he distrusted the intellectuality and cosmopolitan wit of the New York poets, deliberately cultivating a rural sensibility and eschewing humor and irony. When I first began to study “Some South American Poets,” I assumed that Koch was not particularly interested in Lorca, preferring French surrealism to the vogue for Spanish surrealism championed by Robert Bly. Despite the satiric intent of Koch’s parody, however, there is a pattern of evidence indicating that he did hold Lorca in high esteem. He not only praised the “immortal energy” of the Spanish poet without qualification, as noted above, but he also consistently included Lorca’s texts in his anthologies of poetry and pedagogical works for both children and adults. Lorca was one of the playwrights Koch read early on when he was searching for models for poetic drama: “At Harvard, I was reading every verse drama I could find—Lorca, Eliot [...] Yeats, Auden, Delmore Schwartz, even William Vaughn Moody.”31 (While Koch’s own theater might not seem particularly Lorquian, given its comic rather than tragic bent, this reference makes it clear that Koch was already familiar with Lorca’s work before his graduation from Harvard in 1948.) Koch’s short poem “The Aesthetics of Lorca,” forms a section of the longer text “On Aesthetics”: Federico García Lorca stands alone Luna, typewriter, plantain tree, and dust The moon is watching him. It is watching over him.32

The last line here, of course, refers to Lorca’s “Romance de la luna, luna”: “El niño la mira, mira, / el niño la está mirando” [The little Kenneth Koch: Parody and Pedagogy 

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boy watches, watches her {the moon}, / the little boy is watching her]. This brief text, however, does not convey the full impact of what “the aesthetics of Lorca” might have meant for Koch. Perhaps the best place to study such an aesthetics is in his pedagogical works, in which he derives “poetry ideas” from many of his most admired poets, converting their poems into models for imitation. 33 Koch featured poems by Lorca in several books and anthologies designed to teach children (and adults) to appreciate and write poetry: Rose, Where Did You Get that Red ? (1973), Sleeping on the Wing (1981), Talking to the Sun (1988), and Making Your Own Days (1999) all include poems by Lorca.34 Ten lessons, based on poems by Blake, Herrick, Donne, Whitman, Stevens, Williams, Lorca, Ashbery, and Rimbaud comprise the core of Rose, Where Did You Get that Red? A more ample anthology of poems, with briefer instructions on how they might be taught, fleshes out the book.35 Koch uses each poet as the basis for a “poetry idea.” Two poems by Lorca, “Romance sonámbulo” and “Arbolé, Arbolé,” offered both in the original Spanish and in English translation, generate the following assignment: The poetry idea was, “write a poem about a beautiful, strange place which is full of colors. Include some Spanish words in the poem. These may be color words, or any other words you find in the Lorca poems that you would like to use because of what they mean or just because you like the way they look or sound—you don’t have to know what they mean.”36

The results of this method might look like this charming poem by Steven Lenik, a student in the fifth grade: The City of Adventure One day in the City of Verde there was a terrible fall of ramas. The gitana crashed into the earth. All the people ran to the plata house where they were protected. There were no heaters in the plata house so the people died of escarcha.37

The young poet, attentive to both sound and meaning, has used some of the rhyming words in Lorca’s poem with the assonantal pattern a-a: ramas, gitana, plata, escarcha [boughs, gyspy-woman, silver, hoar156 

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frost]. The relation of this poem to the original model, however, is at most tangential. Mayra Morales, similarly, begins her poem “Mars the Green Green Planet” by translating Lorca’s “Verde viento. Verdes ramas,” but then goes on to create her own images: Green wind. Green branches Everything you see is green Green snowflakes, green green songs Will sing upon the green green hill Mañana tomorrow everything will turn azul and amarillo like the blue azul sky. I must go now. Soon the green fades away and everything will vanish.38

Koch’s assignment uses Lorca for exotic color and foreignness; the Spanish words evoke a “beautiful, strange” landscape. Of course, the Spanish language was also part of everyday reality for many of the children in Koch’s classes at P.S. 61 in New York City. (Some wrote their poems directly in Spanish.) Part of the charm, in fact, derives from the way the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange. The poems written by Koch’s students in Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? are certainly more lively and imaginative than the sentimental pablum that passed as poetry for children at the time when Koch began to teach in the schools in the late 1960s. The advantage of using authentic models of poetry, from poets like Blake, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, and Lorca, is inestimable: the task of writing poetry sheds its associations with cutesiness and sentimentality, regaining its authentic range and power. More to the point, the relation between these poetic models and their imitations suggests a fascinating variation on the “poetics of translation” that we have examined throughout this book.39 In the first place, there is an inevitable dilution of the force of the original text in its multiple avatars. The aim is not to produce a simulacrum of the original poem, to write “what Lorca would have written had he been a Puerto Rican school child in New York in the late 1960s,” to echo the formula often used to praise especially adept translations. Instead, the model poem is given the status of a generative Kenneth Koch: Parody and Pedagogy 

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device, a method for producing analogous texts in a context alien to that of the original. The assumption that the task of the translator is to find “the English that Rilke would have used, had he been a contemporary American,” is a highly questionable one in the first place. If Rilke had been a contemporary American, he would not have been “Rilke” at all. We cannot know how Homer would have written in modern English, and even to formulate the question in this way is to posit a curiously ahistorical notion of poetic production, one based on a facile and unarticulated universalism. Would poets like Kabir, Rumi, and San Juan de la Cruz all have chosen to be translated into the same rather bland early twenty-first century free verse? Why should we assume that a translation that happens to be acceptable to its target audience is identical to “what the poet would have written” in such circumstances? The point here is that the process of translation belongs almost entirely to the target culture. It is a “performative interpretation” in which, for better or for worse, the claims of the original weigh very little. In Koch’s poetic pedagogy, the model poem still retains a certain aura, but its main function is to inspire the creation of other texts. These other texts often fit the definition of a certain kind of kitsch. According to Umberto Eco, kitsch results from the production and decoding of secondary artistic effects: To love the Mona Lisa because it represents Mystery, or Ambiguity, or ineffable Grace, or the Eternal Feminine, or because it is a more or less “sophisticated” topic of conversation (“Was she really a woman?” “Just think: one more brush stroke and that smile would have been different!”) means to accept a particular message not for itself but because of a previous decoding which, having now stiffened into a formula, sticks to the message like a tag.40

As we have seen throughout this book, Lorquian kitsch has its own image repertory, its own characteristic vocabulary: Nueva York, Granada, luna, duende. Obviously, the term kitsch has negative connotations, 158 

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but a comparison of Eco’s clichés about the Mona Lisa with the poetry written by Koch’s students reveals a meaningful distinction: it is that gradeschool children bring an entirely fresh perspective to Lorca, a poet they have never read before. Although their work would appear to be a secondary product based on a set of cultural clichés, a parody of Lorca that fails to conserve his poetic power, in actuality it is highly original poetry in its own right, blending Lorca’s exotic color with science fiction imagery. Like the poems by Koch’s “South American Poets,” the texts produced by the children in his classes contribute to the parodic afterlife of Lorca in the United States. An expanded definition of parody, one that emphasizes intertexual transformation rather than ridicule, allows for a wide variety of attitudes toward the source text, from comic irreverence to earnest admiration.41 From this perspective, it would seem unnecessary to disparage the kitsch-like quality of many of the American versions of Lorca we have seen throughout this book: often the best way of assimilating him into the United States is ironically, rather than through a serious attempt to capture the Lorquian duende. The possibility of a poetic pedagogy based on Lorca’s work means that the duende is, in some sense, reproducible: it becomes a repeatable formula rather than a unique source of inspiration. This is how Koch and his collaborator Kate Farrell explain the concept in Sleeping on the Wing, an anthology of poetry compiled for high school students: Lorca thought that this kind of truth, this kind of poetry, was inspired by something he called the duende, a dark, overwhelming source of inspiration. The duende doesn’t inspire gentle, intellectual poetry, but strong, dark, and passionate poetry, poetry that stays always a little mysterious and beyond you.42

This is the duende simplified, made into a cliché for creative writing 101. Such a simplification poses the question of whether it is ever possible to assimilate Lorca into an American poetics without relying a great deal on the romantic myth of the Gypsy poet. Kenneth Koch: Parody and Pedagogy 

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8 Jerome Rothenberg The Lorca Variations

As the driving force behind the original deep image school, Jerome Rothenberg was an indispensable figure in American Lorquismo in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but in subsequent decades Lorca makes only sporadic appearances in his work. As Rothenberg left the deep image behind him, he also stopped following developments in Spanish poetry after Lorca. There are no contemporary peninsular poets, for example, in the second volume of Poems for the Millennium, a massive anthology of international poetry he edited with the poet and translator Pierre Joris. As was the case with Kenneth Koch, Rothenberg’s devotion to Lorca does not imply a sustained interest in the Spanish poetic tradition as a whole, although he did go on much later to translate Picasso’s poetry (also in collaboration with Joris).1 Rothenberg’s major accomplishment of the late 1960s and 1970s was to found the discipline of ethnopoetics, which can be defined as the study of archaic and tribal poetry and poetics with a sensibility informed by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. While developing this field, he was also reshaping the genre of the anthology with innovative collections like Technicians of the Sacred (1967) and America: A Prophecy (1973). Rothenberg’s anthologies do not merely present adjustments of an already existing canon; their aim, rather, is to produce imaginative revisionings of oral and literary traditions through imaginative juxtapositions of disparate texts. 160

Ethnopoetics emerges from Rothenberg’s intuition that avant-garde poetry can shed light on archaic and tribal traditions—and vice versa. It is easy to see, then, why Lorca, heir to the folkloric tradition of Antonio Machado y Álvarez as well as a key figure of the historical avantgarde in Europe, might be the prototypical ethnopoet. He collected popular lullabies and investigated the cante jondo, but was also an intimate friend of Salvador Dalí. What other poet could be so modern and so archaic, so metropolitan and so peripheral within European culture, so foreign and yet so adaptable to the domestic agenda of U.S. poetics? Rothenberg, who first attempted to translate some of the Romancero gitano at the age of fifteen, acknowledges that reading Lorca gave him his first glimpse of this particular juxtaposition of the old and the new: Lorca for me was the first poet to open my mind to the contemporary poetry of Europe and of something possibly older and deeper that would surface for us later in America as well. Reading his poetry then, the words and what they seemed to fuse in combination hit me like electric charges. Romances, coplas, gacelas, casidas, llantos: old forms that came together in old/new patterns to form what he/they called cante hondo (deep song).2

Rothenberg’s 1993 book The Lorca Variations, then, represents a return to a major influence after a long hiatus. After translating the Suites for Christopher Maurer’s authoritative 1991 edition of Lorca’s collected poetry in English, Rothenberg went on to create a kind of Lorquian pastiche by recombining images taken from this book (and from elsewhere in Lorca’s work): “I began to compose a series of poems of my own (‘variations’) that draw on vocabulary, especially nouns & adjectives, from my translations of the Suites (later from Poet in New York as well) but rearrange them in a variety of ways.”3 To my mind, Rothenberg’s translation of the Suites, the principal source of The Lorca Variations, is a dominating presence within Maurer’s bilingual edition of Lorca’s Collected Poems. It accounts for 244 out of a total of 786 pages of poetry—nearly a third of the total.4 Among the contributors to this book, Rothenberg is unique in having been Jerome Rothenberg: the lorca variations  

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a major American poet active during the apogee of North American Lorquismo in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Rothenberg also contributes a one-page preface to his translation for this edition—the only contributor afforded this luxury. While all the translators chosen for The Collected Poems of Federico García Lorca acquit themselves reasonably well, Rothenberg stands out from the others in a few significant respects: he puts the stamp of his own poetic personality on Lorca’s work, experimenting with colloquial and archaic registers and introducing his signature ampersand (&) in place of the word and. This graphic sign, like a watermark appearing on page after page, signals the translation as his own as well as harking back to Paul Blackburn’s Lorca translations. Maurer, unlike Donald Allen and Francisco García Lorca in the 1955 Selected Poems, commissioned new translations rather than making a selection from already existing versions. The earlier Selected Poems was a palimpsest of Englishlanguage Lorquismo from 1939 to 1955: Lloyd, Spender, Campbell, Hughes, Honig, and Merwin were among the contributors. Maurer’s Collected Poems, in contrast, is a contemporary scholarly edition with no pretensions to retrace the reception of Lorca during the postwar period: Few Spanish poets mean as much to American writers as Lorca, and over the past fifty years, gifted poets too numerous to mention have published hundreds of admirable translations, which ought to be collected and reissued. Obviously, this new volume cannot be two things at once: a careful new translation, in light of recent scholarship, of the entire body of poetry, and an anthology of previously published work.5

The inclusion of Rothenberg’s translation of the Suites in such a dominant position, however, reminds the informed reader of Rothenberg’s pivotal role in this history. Maurer himself, needless to say, has been one of the key figures in the reception of Lorca from the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. In addition to the Collected Poems of 1991, he has published several other volumes selecting Lorca’s 162 

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prose and verse, including a revised and expanded version of the Collected Poems in 2002. Rothenberg’s Suites is also, significantly, the first complete translation of this work into English. Since Suites did not appear as a book until André Belamich’s scholarly reconstruction of 1983—more than forty years after the poet’s death—it did not feed into the first several waves of English-language and North American Lorquismo. By the time The Collected Poems of Federico García Lorca appeared, in fact, the image of Lorca had become somewhat fossilized. The availability of a virtually complete Lorca in English, and of the Suites in particular, should allow for a less clichéd vision of Lorca among English-language writers. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether Lorca will inspire other poetic projects not linked to the cultural imaginary that has already taken root in American soil. Rothenberg himself, as we shall see below, only partially avoids reinscribing Lorca into preestablished patterns of reception. The Spanish text of the Suites reprinted in the Collected Poems, and translated by Rothenberg, is not a transcription of Belamich’s edition, but rather Maurer’s editorially improved version. There will probably never be a definitive edition of this work of poetry. The textual history and reconstruction of the Suites is still a fertile area for scholarly investigation, but this investigation is likely to confirm rather than resolve textual uncertainties. Melissa Dinverno is the scholar who has devoted the most sustained attention to this problem. She describes the work as follows: “Written between 1920 and 1923, heavily revised in 1926 and in the 1930s, published in pieces in avant-garde journals, and intended for publication as a collection at least seven times, Suites is a fragmented, complex, and materially-rich text that defies conventional editorial practices.”6 The Suites, then, can only exist as an editorial construction, a version or a compendium of alternate versions, given that “Lorca’s creative process is one of material mobility, chronological flexibility, and textual instability.”7 There is not even an “extant running manuscript for the work,” a manuscript in which all the poems in this series appear ordered from start to finish.8 Jerome Rothenberg: the lorca variations  

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For my own analysis of Rothenberg’s textual transformations of Lorca’s poetry I will rely on Maurer’s 1991 text—the versos facing Rothenberg’s rectos in the Collected Poems—since that is the version that Rothenberg himself used. Dinverno’s richly detailed discussion of the problematic status of the text of Lorca’s Suites is pertinent, though, since Rothenberg’s translation and subsequent adaptation of the Suites takes these principles of textual transformation one step further. Dinverno suggests that the ideal approach to Lorca’s work might be “versioning”: “an editorial approach theorized by textual scholars of Germanic and Anglo-American literatures and grounded in the representation of multiple versions of the text of a work.”9 I find the concept of “versioning” quite suggestive as an approach to English translations of Lorca as well. Rather than attempting to arrive at a definitive or authorita­tive translation, designed to represent this poetry in English once and for all, wouldn’t it be better to provide the reader with multiple versions of the same text in order to lay bare the erratic history of Lorca in English and the contingent nature of translation itself? In such a re­­presentation of Lorca in English, eccentric and awkward translations (Belitt, Bly), historically unique ones (Hughes’s Gypsy Ballads), free textual adaptations (Spicer, Rothenberg), and even Lorquian apocrypha (Spicer, Creeley) would have their place alongside more conventional practices. The Suites lends itself quite well to the Rothenberg’s recombinatorial method, not only because of its textual instability, but also because Lorca’s work already follows a similar procedure of recombining words and images in a theme and variation structure. Each of Lorca’s Suites is a series of variations on a word or image, usually provided in the title. The idea of “writing through” Lorca, using the nouns, adjectives, and images of Rothenberg’s own translation of the Suites as building blocks for the creation of new poems, then, is a potentially productive one. While Lorca’s name is usually associated with notions of depth, Rothenberg’s approach in The Lorca Variations is to stay surprisingly close to the surface, recombining images from Lorca’s texts in an amiable pastiche rather than searching for the daimonic power of the duende. It is to Rothenberg’s credit, I think, that he opts not to revisit the original 164 

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deep image mode, that of his own White Sun Black Sun: it would have been anachronistic to resurrect this poetic mode in the 1990s, given the enormous success of the “mainstream” style of pseudo-Spanish pseudosurrealism in the 1970s and 1980s. Rothenberg was without a doubt aware that the deep image had become a cliché. The Suites, as he himself notes, represents a more elegant, ludic side of Lorca’s poetry: “they struck me as a different kind of Lorca from what I had known before—still characteristically his but with a coolness & (sometimes) quirkiness, a playfulness of mind and music, that I found instantly attractive.”10 In exploring these previously hidden aspects of Lorca’s work, Rothenberg is able to return to Lorca without reincurring in an anachronistic deep image poetics. The first poem of The Lorca Variations is “Lorca’s Spain: A Homage,” a poem that actually predates his translation of the Suites by at least two decades, since it is also found in the 1971 Poems for the Game of Silence, a selection of Rothenberg’s work from the 1960s. The poem opens like this: Beginning with olive trees Shadows. Beginning with roosters Crystal. Beginning with castanets & almonds Fishes. This is a homage to Spain.11

This text, then, serves as a bridge between the earlier period and Rothenberg’s later return to Lorca, anticipating the practice of paying homage to Lorca through a recombination of typically Lorquian imagery. Most of the subsequent poems in The Lorca Variations have an easily identifiable source in one of Lorca’s Suites or in a poem from Poeta en Nueva York. More often than not, the title of the variation will lead us back to Rothenberg’s own translation of one of the Suites. Unlike Jack Spicer, Rothenberg does not challenge the reader to distinguish between what is or is not authentically Lorquian: while all the texts Jerome Rothenberg: the lorca variations  

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are derivative of Lorca, none purports to be a faithful translation, so there is not a meaningful distinction to be drawn between genuine and apocryphal Lorquiana. A typical example of Rothenberg’s procedure is “Federico, Newton, Adam,” which is based on Lorca’s suite “Newton.” Here is the first section of Rothenberg’s poem, followed by the corresponding section of his translation from Lorca’s original: Federico in Paris writing about Newton’s soul without a clue to what it is. Federico bites into a pippin, rotten to the core, the symbol of himself as Adam. Federico with an orange & a pomegranate that the virgin hands him from a bowl of fruit. With his childlike innocence Federico raises age-old questions of the meaning of the apple.12 •  •  •

Why was it the apple & not the orange or the polyhedral pomegranate? Why this virgin fruit to clue them in, this smooth & gentle pippin? What admirable symbol lies dormant at its core? Adam, Paris, Newton carry it inside their souls & fondle it without a clue to what it is.13

Rothenberg’s variation is clearly an adaptation of this faithful translation.14 The main visual images are already present in both Lorca’s 166 

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original and Rothenberg’s translation, so what the third poem supplies is a metapoetic interpretative context: the image of Federico, in his “child-like innocence,” writing a poem about the apple of Adam and Newton, naively posing “age-old questions.” The introduction of this extraneous material raises aesthetic questions. In the first place, what is the effect of imputing “child-like innocence” to the figure of “Federico”? The use of the poet’s first name, along with this phrase, activates a well-known Lorquian cliché: that of Federico García Lorca’s supposed personal and artistic immaturity. Rothenberg attributes the naiveté that Lorca finds in both Adam and Newton to Lorca himself. Stock phrases like “child-like innocence,” “rotten to the core,” and “age-old questions” are also aesthetically problematic, especially since there does not seem to be any ironic intent behind their use. Rothenberg’s free poetic adaptation of this fragment, then, is arguably less satisfying than his first translation. Such judgments, of course, are necessarily subjective. What is significant to my mind, though, is that the unconvincing quality of the writing here has a fairly obvious explanation: the interpretative frame derives from received ideas about Lorca rather than from the truly imaginative revisioning we would expect from a figure of Rothenberg’s stature. Weak writing, in this particular case, derives from a weak conceptualization of the project of writing through the Suites. This is how Rothenberg envisions the process of creating his own poetry out of Lorca’s raw material in the first section of the poem “The Return”: To write through Lorca, to come back on Lorca’s wings, to return to where you’re feeling empty, like dying sweetly after love, to where a rose has left you wounded, the shadow of your childhood like a flower inside your heart, where Lorca’s road trails off into a garden, in which the morning star drops colors onto a faded dress, like paint.15

Here, too, Rothenberg relies too heavily on hackneyed, “poetic” phrases and similes: “dying sweetly after love” and “the shadow of your childhood like a flower inside your heart.” The final phrase, “like paint,” Jerome Rothenberg: the lorca variations  

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does not add all that much to the whimsical quasi-surrealist image of the morning star dripping colors unto a faded dress. While evoking color, the image remains visually indistinct: Lorca would probably have been more concrete—negra, amarilla, verde. The probable source for this poem is “The Return,” a simple poem with more direct, unpretentious images: “I’m coming back / for my wings. // O let me come back.”16 As in the poems of White Sun Black Sun, written some forty years earlier, there is a noticeable gap in quality between the source of inspiration and Rothenberg’s adaptation. Fortunately, Rothenberg is capable of much stronger writing. Here is the first section of his variation VII, “Water,” based on the first two sections of Lorca’s “Water Suite”: Under the spring a silver tremor— as of oxen trampling daisies, memory a lake, a dead tree floating on the mountain water mind & heart a single highway here, dark tree in middle of a black field nightingales and poppies hurtling home.17

These are the two poems from which Rothenberg drew his inspiration: Homeland Trees laid out in black water, daisies & poppies. 168 

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Down the dead highway come three oxen. Nightingales aloft, heart of the tree. •  •  •

Tremor Dark to my mind, with just a memory of silver, a stone of dew. In that field no mountain. Only a clear lake, a snuffed out spring.18

Rothenberg collapses these two consecutive sections into one, combining their images to create a short, condensed, imagistic poem in the best Pound/Williams tradition. By having the oxen trampling the daisies, he makes explicit something that is only implicit in Lorca’s text: the contrast between the delicate flowers and the heavy oxen. A look at further selections from The Lorca Variations would show that Rothenberg’s rewriting of “Water Suite” is quite typical of his method. Rothenberg’s rewriting of “Cementerio judío,” a poem from Poeta en Nueva York, in “Jewish Cemetery 1” and “Jewish Cemetery 2,” makes more of an impact than the rewriting of the Suites that dominate the book. This is the first section of “Jewish Cemetery One”: Daylight like hospitals where corpses burn where gloves are cast aside the women’s anguish buried deeper than our hearts, the children crying in that fire like a million herons, children who have lost their way, hang there from ropes Jerome Rothenberg: the lorca variations  

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with pains down to their feet & blood that spurts out from their eyes cut through like scissors.19

In this case, too, most of the images derive from Lorca’s poem, although here we do not have access to Rothenberg’s first translation, if any exists. Lorca’s original is a problematic poem, an evocation of a Jewish cemetery that features a contrast between “Christ’s children” (“niños de Cristo” / “niñas de Cristo”) and Jews who between them have only “a single dove’s heart” (“un solo corazón de paloma”) and “a pheasant’s solitary eye” (“un solo ojo de faisán”). In contrast to the Christian children, the Jews in their cemetery seem pitiable. The Jews are represented as prisoners, passengers on a ship, and cadavers in a hospital.20 Since the images of “Cementerio judío” do not necessarily converge into a coherent vision, it is difficult to arrive at a univocal interpretation. Both Glass and Nordlund read it as a denunciation of the historical persecution of the Jews, and specifically on the expulsion of the Sephardim from Spain in 1492 and their subsequent sea voyages.21 Nevertheless, the attitude toward the Jews implicit in the imagery of the poem is difficult to pin down. Some of the imagery has pejorative implications: the Jew who appears in the opening line has “el pudor helado del interior de una lechuga” [the chilly shame of the inside of a lettuce-head].22 The overall mood is one of pity and lamentation, not contempt, but I cannot confidently ascribe a positive attitude toward the Jews to the speaker of the poem. Rothenberg’s rewriting of “Cementerio judío” inevitably evokes the holocaust, an historical event that occured after Lorca’s poem was written on January 18, 1930. The Jewish dead in Rothenberg’s poem are the victims of Hitler’s genocide, not those of a Jewish burial ground in Manhattan visited by the Spanish poet many years earlier. Rothenberg’s evocation of Christ and his contrast between Jews and Christians sound very different from those of Lorca, even though the actual imagery is very close: 170 

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It is girls and doves who fly here, Christ who guards this prison, who hides this gate Christ’s joys & fevers see—they say—that dove there in the center no bigger than a hummingbird & see it leap! it flies over your walls like Christ good pheasant ah! good doctor, crouches at your table who wears a surgeon’s coat beckons the buried dead with brightness23

The second part of Rothenberg’s poem, “Jewish Cemetery (2),” is a moving threnody based on further images from “Cementerio judío”: Let them cover her eyes with rags when the dusk begins to gnaw her joints & let the donkeys pass her by let them crack down hard against the marble & let the fevers cut across her like a claw or a boot assault her with the terrors Jews feel in their cemeteries.24

Virtually all the words in both of these passages can be traced back to Lorca’s poems, but we interpret the same image rather differently when we attribute it to Jerome Rothenberg, the Jewish author of Poland, 1931, the anthologist of The Big Jewish Book, an early translator of Celan and a close friend and collaborator with Pierre Joris, the major translator of Celan into English. Rothenberg, in short, is a writer for whom the holocaust has been a central concern.25 Lorca was deeply appreciative of the Jewish contribution to the culture of Spain, especially his native Andalusia, but his perspective on Judaism as a religion is unmistakably that of one raised a Spanish Roman Catholic. Writing to his family during his stay in New York, he remarks on the aridity of Protestant ritual and the unconvincing character of Judaism. He describes his Jerome Rothenberg: the lorca variations  

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visit to the Shearith Israel synagogue, where the “Cementerio judío” was located, in the following terms: “I was doing my best not to laugh. There was a very solemn, beautiful ceremony, but I found it meaningless. To me the figure of Christ seems too strong to deny.”26 Rothenberg’s poem, then, is subject to the Borgesian “Pierre Menard effect,” when the reader adjusts his or her perceptions of the attitudes expressed in a literary work according to preconceived notions of its author’s ideology.27 Even if we see García Lorca as fundamentally sympathetic to the Jews, his imagery takes on a different cast if we read it as the personal expression of a postwar American Jewish poet. The inherent difficulty in interpreting Lorca’s original poem allows for a productive distance between the perspectives of the two authors. The implicit tension between Lorca and Rothenberg gives “Jewish Cemetery” a certain resonance as a Holocaust poem, even though it was written with images derived from a text written by an author in a very different historical situation. There is added poignancy in the fact that Lorca wrote his poem only three years before Hitler came to power in Germany, and six years before he himself fell victim to right-wing violence in Spain, at the onset of a civil conflict that was a prelude to the Second World War. Rothenberg’s rearrangement of the imagery from Lorca’s Suites, in contrast, usually produces acceptable but not striking poems. One problem might be the lack of tension between the original texts and their retranslations. A side-by-side comparison between Rothenberg’s original/derivative poems and Lorca’s originals is difficult to avoid, given the ease of finding the original sources. Since many fragments from Lorca’s Suites are relatively slight in the first place, Rothenberg is able to weave variations on Lorquian themes without producing discordant results. Since his poems are not necessarily more compelling than his own previous translations of the source texts, however, it is sometimes difficult to see what is gained in these adaptations. His textual strategy is a legitimate one, in the venerable tradition of American poets rewriting Lorca’s work, but the results can feel inconsequential.28 172 

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One reason why Rothenberg’s project is sometimes unconvincing may be its belatedness: Rothenberg’s presentation of The Lorca Variations conveys the feeling of a nostalgic return to the heroic enterprise of Rothenberg’s youth, the search for an “American duende,” in the words of Paul Blackburn that Rothenberg quotes in his postface to the book.29 Lorca was a living presence in American poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, when Rothenberg discovered that “Lorca’s glamour had similarly touched poets like Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley.”30 By the last decade of the twentieth century, however, Lorca’s influence had become a matter of historical record. A kind of fossilization has set in: invocations of the duende or “Lorca’s Spain” now convey a sort of period flavor, evoking the aesthetic experimentation of thirty or forty years earlier rather than the excitement of a vitally new project. In a sense, Rothenberg is the victim of his own success, since it was partially through his early efforts that Lorca’s poetry was assimilated into American poetry. Rothenberg’s book might be seen, in part, as an attempt to capture the aesthetic excitement of Jack Spicer’s After Lorca. Rothenberg himself sees the Suites as a precursor to Spicer’s work, although, of course, Spicer himself never knew this particular work: “As a type of ‘serial poetry’ (Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer’s term), the ‘suites’ come early in Lorca’s career but already show a connection with the montage & vernacular methods of early European modernism.”31 The Lorca Variations, then, is also a serial poem indebted to both Lorca and Spicer, to both modern and postmodern textual practices. Rothenberg’s rearrangement of images from Lorca’s poems is similar in some ways to Spicer’s After Lorca: both works of apocryphal Lorquiana create a hybrid voice and test the limit between translation and pastiche. Nevertheless, the two books are radically different in their historical situation. After Lorca was so radical a work for the 1950s that its textual practices could not be understood until a much later date. Spicer was a relatively unknown figure in 1957; The Collected Books of Jack Spicer did not appear until 1975, and Spicer’s influence on contemporary American poetry is most strongly felt in the 1980s with the Jerome Rothenberg: the lorca variations  

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rise of language poetry. The Lorca Variations, in contrast, appears at a moment when such sophisticated postmodern textual practices could be accepted as relatively normal, and when Lorca has already been fully integrated into North American poetics. Rothenberg’s revisioning of Lorca’s Suites, then, is not likely to have the historical significance of Spicer’s earlier and more radical work.

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chapter 8



Conclusion An American Lorca?

Lorca has been a significant source of inspiration for many U.S. poets of the postwar period and beyond. More often than not, however, these poets employ imitative and parodic modes that fall short of capturing the resonance and power usually attributed to the Lorquian duende. Kaufman, Creeley, Duncan, and Ginsberg are selective readers, focus­ ing on a very few key texts like the “Ode to Walt Whitman.” The deep images of 1960s poetry also owe less to Lorca than one might expect. Since Koch and O’Hara were more openly identified with modern French poetry than with either Latin American or Spanish influences, their Lorcaesque texts put into play a somewhat different dynamic than do poets of the deep image school. Lorca is not the primary po­ etic model for O’Hara and Koch, but rather the source of a poetic mode that can be parodied, tried on like a costume of an Arab sheik, or turned into a generative “poetry assignment” for school children. Rothenberg’s enthusiasm for Lorca is unequalled, but The Lorca Variations also swerves away from the depth of deep image poetics and the daimonic possession of the duende, in favor of a more elegant variety of postmodern pastiche. Of all the poets studied in this book, Jack Spicer makes the most intense and productive use of Lorca. His success derives, in large part, from his more radical and rigorous version of the romantic myth that 175

inspired his contemporaries. A certain eccentricity separates Spicer from more clichéd evocations of the duende. Idiosyncrasy can be a saving grace, in Spicer, O’Hara, and Kaufman, while appearing merely arbitrary in the literary vandalism of Ben Belitt. What, then, is Lorca’s ultimate contribution to American poetics? Writing to Robert Creeley in November of 1960, Rothenberg raises (and quickly dismisses) the possibility that Lorca is too foreign to be fully available for American poets: “I’ve been warned, too, and strongly disagree, that certain of these elements are so locked in, say, the Span­ ish tradition and ‘climate’ as to be unusable by poets here.” Rothenberg addresses this problem by giving preference to those “elements that move across languages, in contrast to those that inhere.”1 This approach is eminently sensible, yet Lorca is an attractive figure for American poets in large measure because the Lorquian duende is essentially un­ translatable, “locked” within its native culture and hence infused with an aura of mystery and exoticism: the duende, an untranslatable term, is not, in fact, an element that can easily “move across languages.” To translate the word duende one would need to have recourse to another term equally embedded in a culturally specific tradition : the soul of Af­ rican American soul music, for example. There is a strong tendency among American poets to romanticize their own distance from the original source, to feel nostalgia for a literary tradition felt to be deeper and more authentic. They are quite eager to take Lorca as one of their own, to translate and parody his works within their own cultural con­ text with an enormous sense of liberty. Yet they do so without ever abandoning the ideal of a poet deeply enmeshed in a culture more exotic than their own. Rothenberg is justified in questioning the idea that there is some essential Spanishness inherent to Lorca’s poetry, to which only those belonging to the native culture have access. He is also correct to point out that translation normally depends on elements that are capable of moving across national and linguistic frontiers. Still, he underesti­ mates the difficulty of using Lorca as a model for American poetics. One complication is that there are not one but two varieties of cultural 176 

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nationalism that enter into play, one Spanish and the other American. Another is that many poets who profess an interest in Lorca have a very limited interest in Spanish culture. In some cases, the needs of the American agenda are so strong that Lorca’s poetry becomes a mere pretext. The predominant strain in the American reception of Lorca has been a romantic enthusiasm manifesting itself in variable and idio­ syncratic forms, from Bob Kaufman’s visionary entry into the “crack­ ling blueness” to Frank O’Hara’s very tentative embrace of the campy subjectivity of the “Lorcaesque.” To a large degree, poets as differ­ ent from one another as Kaufman, O’Hara, Ginsberg, Duncan, Mc­ Clure, Morley, Bly, Koch, Hirsch, and Rothenberg remain in thrall to an unapologetically romantic ideology. My survey of the Lorquian strain in American poetry has thrown this underlying romanticism into sharper relief, leading to an altered perspective of this period of literary history. The dominance of a certain romantic subjectivity in American po­ etry of the 1950s and 1960s is not exactly a secret. A critical examination of the widespread enthusiasm for Lorca, however, throws this romanti­ cism into sharper relief. With a few exceptions, American poets have not attempted to “problematize” Lorca’s poetry or their own relation to it. From my perspective, in fact, their approach has sometimes seemed scandalously devoid of intellectual curiosity. What my own reaction tells me is that such enthusiasm for Lorca would probably not have arisen in a more suspicious age, or among a more critically minded assortment of poets. By emphasizing the ways in which American poets have read Lorca in culturally stereotypical ways, I have offered a correction to a widely circulated account that celebrates the warm embrace of the Spanish poet among American poets without stopping to ask the most urgent questions: What does it mean, anyway, for an American poet to be influenced by Lorca? What version of “Lorca” is doing the influencing, and what remains of his poetry after it has been translated into English and exploited for the project of American cultural exceptionalism? an american lorca? 

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Given my own vantage point, it is perhaps inevitable that I have privileged poetic responses that reveal some self-consciousness about the inherent difficulty of these questions. The most canny of the au­ thors studied here express a certain wariness, an acute consciousness of their distance from the model they are imitating and of the impossibil­ ity of summoning up the Lorquian duende in a radically alien cultural context. Spicer, for example, knows that translation is not ventrilo­ quism, that it cannot aim to simulate what “the foreign-language poet would have written, if he or she were a contemporary American”—to paraphrase the conventional blurb on the back cover of many a verse translation. To make this point he puts words in Lorca’s mouth: “The dead are notoriously difficult to satisfy.”2 What would it mean to satisfy Lorca? What would a contemporary American Lorca look like in the first place? I have argued that he would be more akin to Frank O’Hara than to Robert Bly, but actually there is no satisfactory answer to such a question. If Lorca had been a contemporary American of the post­ war period, he might have been influenced by Emily Dickinson, Louis Zukofksy, John Cage, or even by Paul Blackburn’s Poundian transla­ tions of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. In other words, Lorca is not a free-floating genius whose poetry would take the same shape in any environment, but the product of a particular time and place: we cannot expect to read him in an Americanized version and expect some essential core of his poetry to remain constant. While the heroes of my book have been savvy, self-aware, and ironic poets like Spicer and O’Hara, I have been more suspicious of those who have made the duende into a standard topic for creative writ­ ing 101. The problem, of course, is that some poets belong to both groups. Kenneth Koch is at once the ironic parodist of the duende and its genial popularizer. Rothenberg’s Lorca is complexly situated in relation to deep image poetics, Blackburn’s Poundian translation, and Rothenberg’s larger project as poet, translator, and theorist of ethnopo­ etics. If Rothenberg, like Koch, sometimes comes dangerously close to kitsch, this does not mean that his response can be easily dismissed. Scratch the surface of a simplistic stereotype, and you might find an 178 

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odd-shaped, enigmatic object, difficult to classify and worthy of close critical scrutiny: the romantic stereotype inevitably acquires complex­ ity in its individual manifestations. My approach in this book has periodically entailed a return to some notion of Lorca himself, a Lorca who existed before he was trans­ formed into something else by his American admirers. I have pointed out inadequate translations (Belitt, Bly), apocrypha (Blackburn, Spicer, Creeley), and weak imitations of Lorquian surrealism (Baraka, Rothen­ berg, Bly). At the same time, however, I have not engaged in many close readings of Lorca’s poems. In a few cases, my interpretation of a partic­ ular text diverges strongly from the prevalent understanding of the same text within the American tradition. For example, I am person­ ally incapable of reading “Ode to Walt Whitman” as a celebration of homosexuality. In such cases, my reading might provide a superior account of the words on the page and of the cultural context in which Lorca was writing, but it would still be mistaken from the point of view of American literary history. It is ultimately pointless to wish that Ginbserg, Spicer, and Duncan had responded to this poem from the perspective of a Spanish professor writing fifty years later. Lorca’s poetic afterlife in the United States, then, has its own con­ text, as worthy of respect as the cultural and literary context of Lorca’s Spain. Understandably, American poets did not attempt a scholarly reconstruction of the circumstances in which Lorca wrote, or delve deeply into Spanish literary history in order to arrive at a better under­ standing of his poetic tradition. Good information about Lorca was available at a fairly early stage—in Rafael Martínez Nadal’s introduc­ tion to the Spender/Gili Selected Poems, in Edwin Honig’s 1944 mono­ graph—but it is hard to conclude that the American Lorca rested on a solid scholarly foundation, or, even less, that it should have been more scholarly than it was. I have argued in this book that the real strength of the American Lorca is its apocryphal character, its lack of respect for the original context, not its scrupulously accurate treatment of the original text. The American response to Lorca provides an inside look at what an an american lorca? 

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American sees when he or she looks at a “foreign” poet. In a broader sense, I have wanted to find out what an American of the era of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Cage, Mark Rothko, Jack Kerouac, and Frank O’Hara might see when looking at a previous moment of extraordinary cultural efflorescence, one defined by equally venerable names like Pablo Picasso, Manuel de Falla, Luis Buñuel, and Federico García Lorca. This turns out to be personal question for me, as a product of one of these periods and a professional student of the other. The answer sug­ gested by these lists of names is that the power of the romantic genius remains virtually undiminished well into the so-called postmodern era. Modernist (and even postmodernist) culture heroes now play this role, as romantic poets might have in an earlier period. Harold Bloom continues to popularize his own version of the romantic sublime in books like Genius, while a mostly male canon of poetry-in-translation dominates poetry publishing, with fresh versions of Baudelaire, Rilke, Neruda, and Lorca appearing every year. Lorca’s iconic status for an entire generation of canonical American poets further reinforces his dominating position in the canon, to the detriment of newer voices in contemporary Spanish poetry. Although contemporary Spanish poetry is extraordinarily rich, with figures of the stature of Antonio Gamoneda and Olvido García Valdés, the greater part of this poetry remains untranslated. While there have been trans­ lations of other poets of Lorca’s own epoch, ultimately American poets do not feel a deep need to read Spanish poets writing after Lorca. The reason, I believe, is that contemporary Spanish poets do not fit the Lorquian model of romantic genius and cultural essence. A Spanish poetry without bulls, olive trees, and flamenco dancers holds almost no interest at all for the contemporary American reader. The continued dominance of authors like Lorca in the canon of poetry-in-translation justifies my suspicion of the genius model of lit­ erary history. What is the duende, in fact, but a peculiarly Spanish version of the genius loci or “spirit of the place”? If we consider duende (from dueño de casa or master of the house) as a virtual synonym for ge180 

conclusion

nius, then we must conclude that American poets saw in Lorca a source for the romantic sublime from outside their own culture, a semidivine figure of inspiration rather than a poet like any other. While I too ad­ mire Lorca and even think of him as a sort of genius, I have concluded that the romantic paradigm is an obstacle to a deeper and more critical reading. In this book I have presented Lorca as an imperfect and selfcontradictory figure, a poet whose impact on American poetry of the postwar period is both fascinating and deeply problematic.

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Notes

Preface

1. There are also more available editions of Rilke and of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in English than of Lorca, but Lorca’s influence, as I hope to show in this book, has been even more pervasive, extending to numerous U.S. poets who are not primarily associated with the explosion of interest in Spanish-language poetry that occured in the 1970s. Translation of Neruda begins in earnest only in the early 1960s, and his influence, spurred by his 1971 Nobel Prize, is felt most strongly in the 1970s and 1980s. The essays collected by Teresa Longo in Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry provide a good overview of the reception of the Chilean poet in the United States. Taken as a whole, they also suggest that the dynamic of Neruda’s reception is very different from that of Lorca’s—despite the frequent linkage of their names. 2. Most names on this list are from the United States, but I have also included a few English-language poets from the UK, South Africa, and Canada. 3. I will use the adjective “American” at times in place of the more rigorous “U.S.” This usage is inherent to the cultural moment that is my focus, that of The New American Poetry. The reader is free to supply his or her own “scare quotes” around the term “American,” but I have chosen to omit them. Rigorously speaking, the “American Lorca” would also include the Canadian and Latin American reception. CHAPTER 1

1. García Lorca, Obras completas, 3:308. 2. García Lorca, Deep Song, 64. 3. The best treatment of Lorca’s Andalusia is Morris, Son of Andalusia. 4. Keats, Selected Letters, 60. 5. The application of this concept to Lorca occured to me in a late night conversation with the Spanish poet Juan Carlos Mestre, the author of La tumba de Keats, as I attempted to explain my project to him.

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6. Francisco García Lorca, In the Green Morning, 232. 7. Bloom, Genius, 609. 8. Ibid., 610–13. 9. Russell, review of Federico García Lorca, by Loughran, 492. The idea of the inherent difficulty of understanding Lorca is found repeatedly in the secondary literature. C. B. Morris, for example, writes of “how difficult it is to pin down García Lorca, whose poetry continues to sidestep and rise above the catalogs and classifications it invites” (Morris, review of Lorca, by García Posada, and F. García Lorca, edited by García Posada, 506). 10. I have written scholarly books and articles about twentieth-century Spanish poetry for more than twenty years without discussing the life of any poet in any particular detail. There is gap between the normal practice of literary studies, in which biography is seen as an irrelevant distraction, and the “life and work” paradigm that is still in place in specialized scholarship on certain canonical authors. 11. Fernández Cifuentes, “La verdad de la vida,” 101. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 12. Ibid., 100. 13. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1:78. Needless to say, Foucault is not arguing that sexuality really is the master key to human personality; instead, he is studying the process by which sexuality came to occupy this role in Western culture. The definitive monograph on the gay Lorca has yet to be written. 14. I wrote this book in 2007 and 2008, following the developments in this controversy at http://www.memoriahistorica.org, the home page of the “Asociación para la recuperación de la memoria histórica” [Association for the recuperation of historical memory]. 15. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 147. 16. Ibid., 152. 17. Keatsian “negative capability” and the Foucauldian concept of the “author-function” both provide ways of accounting for Lorca’s fundamental plurality, but from divergent positions. Keats sees the Protean self as the characteristic of a certain kind of genius, like Shakespeare, while Foucault sees it as a discursive function that results from attributing divergent texts to a unitary authorial presence. 18. García Lorca, Collected Poems, 446–47, 532–37. 19. Ibid., 554–55. 20. Fernández Cifuentes, “La verdad de la vida,” 96. 21. Jiménez Heffernan, Los papeles rotos, 199. 22. Francisco García Lorca, Green Morning, 70–80. See also Fernández-Montesinos, “Datos sobre la biblioteca.” 23. García Lorca, In Search of Duende, 48. Although this is a hyperbolic statement that cannot be taken at face value, it does reveal Lorca’s intellectual curiosity. 24. In traditional Spanish literary history, Lorca is seen as part of the so-called generation of 1927, along with Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Emilio Prados, Luis Cernuda, Vicente Aleixandre, Rafael Alberti, and others. The concept of the literary “generation” has been under attack for longer than I have been in the field. American readers, however, more often than not view Lorca as sui generis rather than as a member of a group, so I will not address

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this particular classificatory problem here. The best available treatment of this problem is Anderson, El veintisiete en tela de juicio. 25. Benjamin, Illuminations, 100; original emphasis. 26. Gibson, Federico García Lorca, 23. 27. García Lorca, Teatro inédito de juventud, ed. Soria Olmedo. 28. See, for example, Dinverno, “García Lorca’s Suites.” 29. Francisco García Lorca, Green Morning, 200–201. 30. Martínez Nadal traces this perception to two earlier critics: “‘None amongst his contemporaries has read fewer books,’ states J. F. Montesinos. Angel del Río, who quotes that sentence in his book, softens it a little when he adds ‘though to a lesser degree than his conteporaries, he was a fully conscious and studious artist’” (Lorca’s “The Public,” 128). He finds this perception to be odd: “What is puzzling about that early unanimity of judgment is that it precisely contradicts the fact that all Lorca’s work radiates traditional and learned culture (acknowledged, curiously enough, by all those who spoke of his limited reading) with an intensity and variety rarely equalled by any of his contemporaries” (ibid., 219). 31. Gibson, Federico García Lorca, 166–67. 32. Ibid., 228–29. 33. Carnero et al., “Preguntas,” 232; emphasis added. I myself am deeply interested in the musicality of Lorca’s work. 34. Ibid. 35. In September 1928 Salvador Dalí writes a letter to Lorca that would permanently damage their friendship, singling out “La casada infiel” [The faithless wife] for criticism: “The worst part, I think, is the one about the fellow who carries her down to the river. Wit and humor produced by a state of mind based on appreciation, sentimentally deformed by anachronism” (Maurer, Sebastian’s Arrows, 101; original emphasis). See Soria Olmedo, Fábula y fuente, 296–323, for an astute discussion of the initial reception of this poem in the context of Lorca’s discomfort over his increasing fame as gypsy-poet. 36. Charnon-Deutsch, Spanish Gypsy, 207. 37. García Lorca, Obras completas, vol. 3; original emphasis. 38. Soria Olmedo, Fábula y fuente, 299. This letter to Guillén is, in fact, cited with some frequency in the secondary literature on Romancero gitano. At this point I cannot identify the first source in which I came across it. 39. Soria Olmedo, Fábula y fuente, 296 et passim. Several of Lorca’s romances were already well known before the 1928 publication of Romancero gitano, through publication in literary magazines and through Lorca’s own poetry recitals. 40. In the “Conferencia-recital del Romancero gitano,” which dates from 1935, Lorca famously defines the collection as “antipintoresco, antifolclórico, antiflamenco” [antipicturesque, antifolkloric, antiflamenco] (Obras completas 3:179). 41. See Pérez-Minik, Facción surrealista española de Tenerife. 42. Taking a cue from a lyric by Lorenz Hart, Andrew Anderson argues for this narrower definition in “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” 243. While his focus here is on theater rather than lyric poetry, the larger point is valid for all genres of literature. 43. Ilie, Surrealist Mode.

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44. See Morris, Surrealism in Spain; and Neira, “Surrealism in Spain.” 45. For a detailed commentary in English on the sonnets, see Anderson, Lorca’s Late Poetry, 305–99. A reliable text of these poems was not available in Spanish until 1984. 46. Chicano Poet Francisco X Alarcón uses Lorca in the 1992 collection De amor oscuro/ Of Dark Love. See Álvarez, “El Amor Oscuro.” A sequel to my own study would have to consider the impact of Lorca’s poetry on more contemporary poets. CHAPTER 2

1. Duncan, Caesar’s Gate, 44. The accent on García is missing in the original, which also has staind rather than stained. I have used the indication [sic] in other cited texts that omit this accent, not out of a desire to be pedantic, but because Garcia represents an Americanization of Lorca’s paternal surname: it is important to disinguish between poets familiar enough with the conventions of Spanish orthography to include the accent, and those who are not. I follow the standard practice (in both the U.S. and the Spanish-speaking world) of referring to Lorca by his second (maternal) surname. (Lorca is a more distinctive name than García, so the normal convention of using the paternal name does not apply.) In Spanish, he can be referred to as García Lorca, Federico García Lorca, or Lorca, but usually not as García, Federico García, or Federico Lorca. 2. Blackburn, Cities, 12. 3. Venuti, Scandals of Translation, 67. 4. García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Medina and Statman, xv–xvi. 5. For an informed account of the earliest reception of Lorca in the United States, see Howard Young, “La primera recepción.” 6. Walton, “Last Poems” (electronic source). See also García Lorca, Last Poems, ix–x. 7. Williams, Selected Essays, 219–30. 8. Honig, García Lorca, 20–46. Arturo Barea’s book, Lorca: The Poet and His People, was also published in 1944, but in England. This work is a translation of a work written originally in Spanish, so I still count Honig’s as the first anglophone book on Lorca. 9. For additional details on Humphries’s translations of Lorca see Young, “La primera recepción,” 109–13. According to Young, Humphries did not really care for the surrealism of Lorca’s New York poetry and had only a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish. 10. Duncan, Caesar’s Gate, xv–xxxv. 11. Young distinguishes three phases in the American reception of Lorca: (1) sporadic translations before Lorca’s death in 1936, (2) translations between 1936 and 1940, and (3) Lor­ ca’s impact on postwar American poetry, especially Robert Bly and Philip Levine (“La primera recepción,” 105–6). My approach to periodization reflects my own priorities: I see an initial groundswell of interest from the late 1930s through about 1955, an explosion of Lorquismo from about 1955 to the mid-to-late 1960s, and finally a repetition of stereotypes in subsequent decades. 12. “Academic” poets of this period did not share in the romanticism of Ginsberg, Duncan, or Koch. That might explain their lack of interest in Lorca. The confessionals were more romantic, less ironic, in temperament, so their indifference is harder to explain.

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notes to pages 19–26

Although Lorca was a playwright as well as a poet, he had little discernible impact on American theater of the postwar period: the playwrights most interested in his theater were themselves poets like Kenneth Koch and Amiri Baraka. 13. “From 1962 until 1970 much of my creative activity was focused on the composition of an extended cycle of vocal works based on the poetry of Federico García Lorca. The cycle includes Night Music (1963) for soprano, keyboard, and percussion; four books of Madrigals (1965–69) for soprano and a varying instrumental combination; Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death (1968) for baritone, electric instruments, and percussion; Night of the Four Moons (1969) for alto, banjo, alto flute, amplified cello, and percussion; and Ancient Voices of Children (1970) for soprano, boy soprano, and seven instrumentalists” (Crumb, “Songs” [electronic source]). 14. De Lisle, “Who held a Gun,” (electronic souce). http://arts.guardian.co.uk/fridayreview/ story/0,,1305765,00.html. 15. I first learned of Cohen’s and Baez’s adaptations of Lorca through the Englishlanguage Wikipedia entry on Lorca. Wikipedia, “Federico García Lorca” (electronic source). 16. Answering a survey “What’s American about American Poetry” in 1999, a wide array of almost one hundred poets of varying ethnicities and national origins tend to cite Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams as being distinctively American. The diversity of answers to the survey questions reflects differences among these poets, not all of whom were born in the United States; some reject the premise behind the survey. Significantly, for my purposes, Lorca’s name comes up in the responses of at least seven poets: Frank Lima, Clayton Eshleman, Diane Wakoski, Andrei Codrescu, Philip Levine, Collette Inez, and Sam Hamill. Poetry Society of America, “What’s American” (electronic source). 17. Madsen, American Exceptionalism, 100. 18. The late Richard Rorty lies squarely in this tradition, invoking Emerson, Whitman, and Dewey in Achieving Our Country. See the first chapter, “American National Pride,” 3–38. Magee, in Emancipating Pragmaticism, traces an American pragmatist trajectory—with strong exceptionalist elements—from Emerson to Ralph Ellison, Frank O’Hara, and Amiri Baraka. 19. Lardas, Bop Apocalypse, 41. 20. My own biography is heavily inflected by American exceptionalism. I grew up in a religious sect founded in the nineteenth century that preached a providentialist version of American history. My strongest interests, apart from Spanish literature, are American jazz and poetry of the 1950s and 1960s. Even my engagement with other cultures derives from the academic liberalism of postwar America. To view myself as a typical product of the culture into which I was born (in 1960) has helped me to clarify my views of American Lorquismo. 21. García Lorca, Gypsy Ballads, trans. Langston Hughes, 1. 22. Alonso, “Lorca and the Expression,” 50. 23. Ellison, Living with Music, 100. 24. One prevalent explanation, of course, is that news of Lorca’s political asassination at the beginning of the Spanish civil war provided the impetus for the international fascination with Lorca, as this event became a powerful symbol of the brutal rise of Fascism in

notes to pages 26–31 

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Europe. Nevertheless, this event does not fully explain the continued relevance of Lorca within American culture during the ensuing decades. Some poets mention Lorca’s death; others do not. 25. Voznesensky, Selected Poems, 55. 26. Ibid., 56. 27. Ibid., 12. 28. Creeley, Collected Essays, 270. 29. Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, 341. 30. O’Hara, Collected Poems, 468. 31. For a detailed scholarly analysis of the State Department tours, see Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World. 32. Voice of America disc jockey Willis Conover, for example, described jazz as “a cross between total discpline and total anarchy. The musicians agree on tempo, key and chord structure but beyond this everyone is free to express himself. This is jazz. And this is America. It’s a musical reflection of the way things happen in America” (quoted in Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World, 16–17). 33. Von Eschen makes this point repeatedly throughout her book. 34. See Saunders, Cultural Cold War, 252–78. I agree with her conclusion that “the work of the Abstract Expressionists cannot be reduced to the political history in which it was situated. Abstract Expressionism, like jazz, was—is—a creative phenomenon existing independently and even, yes, triumphantly, apart from the political use which was made of it” (277). 35. Ellison, Living With Music, 100. 36. Szwed, So What, 208. 37. Hirsch also cites Tynan: “Whatever else he may lack, Miles Davis has the duende” (Hirsch, Demon and the Angel, 205). I have not consulted Tynan’s original article. 38. Hughes, ed., New Negro Poets U.S.A., 55. 39. Ibid. 40. Damon, Dark End of the Street, 36. 41. Kaufman, Cranial Guitar, 128. 42. Ibid., 138. 43. Ibid. 44. García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Ben Belitt, 23–25. 45. Kaufman, Cranial Guitar, 139. 46. García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Ben Belitt, 2–3. 47. Kaufman, Cranial Guitar, 139. 48. García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Simon and White, 160–61. I would translate ropero as closet rather than as wardrobe in this instance. 49. Ibid., 156–57. 50. In chapter 1, I argued that we should not identify the speaking subject unproblematically with the biographical subject in Lorca’s poetry. Nevertheless, the claim that it is the speaker of the poem, not Lorca himself, who launches a tirade against the maricas does not really resolve the issue here. For one thing, no American poet reading this poem draws such a distinction. There is nothing to indicate that these are not Lorca’s own views: they are

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notes to pages 32–42

expressed so virulently that he would have distanced himself from them in some way if they were meant to be ironic. 51. Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 144. The ellipsis after the third line of this passage forms part of Ginsberg’s original note. 52. Ibid., 768–69. 53. Ibid., 175; emphasis added. 54. For Lorca’s own encounter with Crane in New York, see Anderson, “Un puente entre dos poetas.” 55. O’Hara, Collected Poems, 498. 56. This poem is also a favorite of Amerian poets who are not gay. As noted above, Creeley cites it in answer to Voznesensky. The index to the Selected Letters of James Wright contains a total of fifteen references to Lorca, the majority of them to this one poem. Wright, A Wild Perfection. 57. Duncan, Caesar’s Gate, xxii. While writing this chapter I had access to an unpublished paper by Stephen Fredman from his book in progress titled Contextual Art: Erotic Poetics in the Assemblage Era which uses this same quote. I am grateful to Fredman for sharing his work in progress with me. 58. Duncan, Caesar’s Gate, xxix; “Slaves of Women. Their bedroom bitches” (García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Simon and White, 163). 59. Duncan, Caesar’s Gate, xix; emphasis in original. 60. See chapter 8 for a discussion of Rothenberg’s rewriting of this poem. 61. Wakoski, Emerald Ice, 190. 62. Morley, To Hold in My Hand, 17. 63. Ibid., 125. 64. One exception may be Alarcón’s take on Lorca’s sonnets (see chapter 1). Shapiro reports having written hundreds of imitations of Lorca in the early 1960s, inspired by the Donald Allen/Francisco García Lorca Selected Poems. His poems “Asturiana” and “You are Tall and Thin” both echo Lorca by way of Manuel de Falla (personal communication with the author). Since most readers would not connect Shapiro with Lorca, this suggests that there is a subterranean influence in many other poets who do not pay explicit homage to the Spanish poet. 65. Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities, 21. 66. Ibid., 31. 67. Lorca’s lecture “Juego y teoría del duende” was first given in Buenos Aires in October 1933. Belitt’s 1955 version was the first in English. A. L. Gili later translated the lecture for a British edition of Lorca’s poetry, and there have been a few subsequent translations as well. 68. Levertov, New & Selected Essays, 33–43. 69. McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, 91.

,

CHAPTER 3

1. García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Medina and Statman, xxii. 2. Prose translations of verse belong to a separate category, since the visual format might signal the absence of a specifically poetic intention.

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3. The conventional notion is that scholars will produce dry and overliteral versions, while poets will be freer and less rigorous, but this division of labor does not necessarily obtain. Hyperliteralism, for example, can result from a weak grasp of the source language more characteristic of poets. Scholars can misconstrue and embellish the original text, while poets sometimes attain a high degree of scholarly expertise. 4. In The Translator’s Invisibility, Lawrence Venuti frames the ongoing historical debate around translation as a conflict between “fluency” and “the translator’s invisibility,” on the one hand, and a “foreignizing” translation practice based on Schleiermacher’s theory, on the other. Venuti strongly favors disruptions of the dominant (and ideological suspect) norm of fluency. My sympathies, too, lie with foreignizing translation, but I am also interested in exploring the norms of acceptability that allow a translation to reach its target audience. 5. Honig, “Lorca to Date,” 122. 6. I have not been able to do justice to some earlier contributors to the translation of Lorca (Honig, Humphries, Lloyd, Campbell) or to the numerous translations that have been published since 1980. To do so would require two additional chapters of equivalent length. Robert Bly’s contribution to the translation of Lorca will be treated in the context of the deep image school of poetry (chapter 4). 7. For a selected bibliography of Lorca in English see García Lorca, Collected Poems, 862–63. I will follow standard usage here and refer to Lorca’s romances as ballads, since virtually every English-language translator and commentator before me has accepted this term as a functional equivalent. In my own mind, however, the ballad and the romance are two very different species of animal. Of course, the term ballad is a perfectly good one to apply to a translation of a Lorca poem into English. 8. García Lorca, The Gypsy Ballads of Federico García Lorca, trans. Humphries, 30. 9. Ibid., 19. Medina and Statman, in their otherwise acceptable translation of Poet in New York, persistently and perversely truncate Lorca’s repetitions, translating “Negros, negros, negros, negros,” for example, as “Blacks” (García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Medina and Statman, 26–27). Repetition is such a key device in Lorca’s poetry that its omission in the translation is inexplicable. The translators justify this procedure as follows: “All this play, this erasure, has seemed necessary to retain the feeling, the power, the music of Lorca’s work” (xxi). But how is the power of Lorca’s music retained by the erasure of this musical device? 10. García Lorca, Gypsy Ballads, trans. Humphries, 36. 11. García Lorca, Collected Poems, 519. 12. García Lorca, Gypsy Ballads, trans. Humphries, 19; emphasis added. I have italicized extraneous elements added by the translator. 13. See Brent Hayes Edwards’s account of Hughes’s encouter with Lorca’s poetry during the Spanish civil war in “Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diasporas.” 14. García Lorca, Gyspy Ballads, trans. Hughes. Hughes’s version is incomplete: he translated the first fifteen poems of Lorca’s book, leaving out the three concluding “Romances históricos.” For the relations between Hughes and Lorca, see María Paz Moreno, “Gyspy Moon over Harlem.” I remain agnostic over the question of whether Lorca and Hughes met personally, as Moreno argues. If they had, Hughes would have probably mentioned this fact in his autobiography.

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notes to pages 54–57

15. Literary history would have different if this volume had been published by a major New York trade publisher in the mid-1940s, but, according to Arnold Rampersad, “Alfred Knopf himself, advised by a senior editor, flatly rejected the Lorca book, without offering much of an explanation” (Life of Langston Hughes, 2:119–20). 16. Rolfe Humphries’s 1953 version, published by Indiana University Press, is not consistently bad, but it ignores the importance of repetition in Lorca’s poetry (as noted above), and introduces redundancies like “Worthy / of a queen or an empress,” where Hughes has “worthy of an empress.” Hughes’s Gypsy Ballads is also superior, in my view, to Will Kirkland’s acceptable but overly tame version. Kirkland, for example, translates “bellas de sangre contraria” as “lovely with the other’s blood” (García Lorca, Collected Poems, 524–25; emphasis added), diluting the force of the adjective contraria [contrary, opposing, rival, enemy]. 17. García Lorca, Gypsy Ballads, trans. Hughes, 18. 18. Ibid., 21. 19. Ibid., 6, 36. 20. Ibid., 10. 21. Ibid., 8–9. 22. Ibid., 8, 30. 23. Ibid., 9, 29. 24. From a personal communication to the author from New Directions. 25. García Lorca, Selected Poems, ed. Francisco García Lorca and Donald Allen, 98–99; emphasis added. 26. Ibid., 78–79. 27. Ibid., 146–47. 28. Ibid., 68–69; emphasis added. 29. Ibid., 104–5. 30. Ibid., 12–13, 76–77. There is another form of dilution that I have not seen in Spender and Gili: “lexical generalization,” or the replacement of a noun in a particular category with the generic name for this category. Examples might be estaño [tin] as metal (García Lorca, Gypsy Ballads, trans. Humphries, 10), or nardos [spikenards] as flowers (García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Medina and Statman, 72–73). 31. García Lorca, Selected Poems, 116–17. 32. I hesitate to invoke national stereotypes, in a book written largely to question them. I could have argued, for example, that the staid British poet Stephen Spender was insensitive to Lorca’s Spanish passion and sensuality. 33. Jorge Luis Borges points out that translations are not necessarily inferior to their originals. It is only the sacralization of the idea of the original text that makes all translations seem to be deficient simulacra. According to Borges, Roy Campbell’s “when all the house is hushed” might be judged verbally superior to the original line from San Juan de la Cruz, “estando ya mi casa sosegada.” “I suppose if we did not know which was the original and which was the translation, we could judge them fairly.” Borges, This Craft of Verse, 64–65. 34. García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Belitt, 154–66.

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35. Ibid., ix–xxxix. 36. Ibid., 6–7. 37. Ibid., 38–39. 38. Ibid., 10–11; emphasis added. 39. Ibid., 60–61. 40. Ibid., 52–53. 41. Ibid., 62–63. 42. Ibid., 13, 67. 43. Ibid., xlii. 44. Belitt, Adam’s Dream, 45–53. 45. The most widespread models of translation, in my view, have been (1) “fluent paraphrase,” in which the translator attempts to recreate the original in a poetic style acceptable to a contemporaneous reader (of whatever period), and (2) the attempt to arrive at a reasonable compromise between the conflicting demands of fidelity and acceptability. 46. Eshleman, Antiphonal Swing, 227. 47. The only critical commentary I have found on Lorca/Blackburn is Stephen Fredman’s review “Blackburn the Translator.” Fredman is especially perceptive on Blackburn’s use of the vernacular in these translations. 48. García Lorca, Lorca/Blackburn, 46–47. The pages of this book are unnumbered and there is no table of contents. For purposes of citation I have numbered the pages from 1 to 91, beginning with the recto where Economou’s “Forward” appears, immediately following the copyright page. 49. Ibid., 40–41. 50. Ibid., 72–73. 51. Ibid., 44–45; García Lorca, Gypsy Ballads, trans. Hughes, 14. 52. Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility, 236–73. 53. Ibid., 187. 54. García Lorca, Lorca/Blackburn, 53. 55. Ibid., 49. 56. Blackburn explained his methods to an interviewer in the following terms: “I want other people to be able to read the poems with as much of the emphasis of my own voice as possible, and to do that you have to control the poem typographically on the page. You can control your rhythms visually in many ways; you can lay them out on a page in any way that is comprehensible to the reader—what the pauses are, where they fall, how long they are” (Dembo, “Interview with Paul Blackburn,” 142–43). Unfortunately, there is no standard convention for visually indicating the exact length of a pause on the written page, so this control is illusory at best. CHAPTER 4

1. Hoover, Postmodern American Poetry, xxxiii. 2. Other interpretations are possible: the deep of “deep image” could be the deep of “deep structure” in Chomskyan linguistics or the deep of Jungian depth psychology. 3. Hoover, Postmodern American Poetry, xxxiii.

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notes to pages 63–79

4. Ibid., xxv. 5. Rothenberg, Lorca Variations, 88. 6. Rasula, “Deep Image,” 30. 7. Rothenberg also published poems by David Ignatow and W. S. Merwin, poets later associated with a more “mainstream” conception of the deep image. 8. James Breslin, Modern to Contemporary, 176. 9. Paul Breslin, Psycho-Political Muse, 118. 10. In a more recent article focused mostly on Wright, Halpern lists the deep image poets as Bly, Simpson, Stafford, Strand, Donald Hall, and John Haines, citing Kelly and Rothenberg as theorists but not major poets of the movement (Nick Halpern, “‘Coming Back Here How Many Years Now’: August Kleinzahler and James Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River,” 431). I do not believe that Hall belongs in such a list, but his inclusion here points to the amorphous nature of the concept itself, and the widespread conflation of the deep image with mainstream American poetry of a more realist bent. 11. Rothenberg did reprint a handful of poems from White Sun Black Sun in the 1971 volume Poems for the Game of Silence, which traces his poetic evolution over the course of the 1960s, from the deep image to ethnopoetics. This book, however, is also out of print. 12. Rasula, “Deep Image,” 31. 13. Rasula, in crediting Bly with the promotion of European and Latin American poetry in the United States, makes one significant slip: “Only Rilke, of the many poets Bly has promoted, had a significant presence in English before he took up the cause” (“Deep Image,” 42). As we have seen in the previous chapter, Lorca already enjoyed a substantial reputation by the mid-1950s, in part because of the translations of Lloyd, Spender, Honig, and Humphries in previous decades. Bly did not publish the first issue of The Fifties until 1958, and did not collect his translations of Lorca in book form until the 1973 Lorca & Jiménez. It is common to credit Bly with the popularization of Spanish language poetry in the United States, and, indeed, his efforts have been extensive. Nevertheless, Lorca was already an influential presence in American poetry before Bly’s promotional efforts of the 1960s. Bly was more influential in promoting other poets: Machado, Aleixandre, Hernández, and Neruda. 14. Marjorie Perloff makes a similar point when she compares A. A. Ammons with Denise Levertov, asking why Levertov is considered part of the avant-garde (she appears in Hoover’s anthology, for example) while Ammons, a poet very similar to her in numerous respects, is not. According to Perloff, it ultimately comes down to a question of affiliation and social networking (“Whose American Poetry,” 114–17). 15. A further complication here is that the poets of Rothenberg’s original circle were not included in Don Allen’s 1960 Grove Press anthology The New American Poetry. The incorporation of these slightly younger poets (Kelly, Rothenberg, Antin, Wakoski) into a more inclusive concept of the postwar avant-garde would take place a little later. 16. Rasula, “Deep Image,” 30; original emphasis. David Antin was also associated with Rothenberg’s original circle, but was always suspicious of the deep image. 17. Hoover, Postmodern American Poetry, xxxiii. 18. I have occasionally seen Spaniards like Jorge Guillén and Juan Ramón Jiménez labeled “Latin American poets.”

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19. Without significant exceptions, none of the European and Latin American poets credited with inspiring deep image poetry is a woman. By the same token, only two women, Diane Wakoski and Rochelle Owens, are listed as participants in this movement in the sources with which I am familiar. (Denise Levertov appears in some publications edited by Rothenberg and is praised by Bly, but her main affiliations lie elsewhere.) This male dominance follows the pattern we have seen in the reception of Lorca generally, and probably reflects the overall state of American culture at the time rather than a specific effort to exclude women in this particular movement. 20. Rothenberg, “Why Deep Image,” 32. 21. Rothenberg, White Sun Black Sun, 29. 22. García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Simon and White, 6–7. 23. Rothenberg, White Sun Black Sun, 26. 24. Kelly, “Notes on the Deep Image,” 15. 25. Rothenberg, Pre-Faces, 54–55. 26. Rothenberg, New Young German Poets. 27. Rothenberg, Lorca Variations, 88. 28. There are two poems by Rafael Alberti, but none from his most surrealist book, Sermones y moradas. 29. Walter Kaladjian, for example, explains how Wright’s poetry draws on “an innovative variety of verse styles ranging from the surrealism of poets like Georg Trakl, Pablo Neruda, Cesar [sic] Vallejo and Juan Ramón Jiménez, to the Jungian and Freudian formulations of Robert Bly’s ‘subjective,’ or ‘deep image,’ poetry, as well as the American realism of such authors as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters” (“Many of Our Waters,” 102). The so-called surrealism of such poets, of course, provides the basis for Bly’s formulation of deep image, so it is hard to see these stylistic influences as two separate entities. The inaccuracies of Kaladjian’s formulation are quite typical in the secondary literature on Bly and Wright. Since these two poets translated Trakl, there is an assumption too that this Austrian poet was a “surrealist,” even though his actual affiliations were with German expressionism. Trakl committed suicide in 1914, ten years before the first surrealist manifesto. 30. Wright, Collected Poems, 128. 31. Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, 6. 32. Wright, Collected Poems, 114, 125. 33. Rothenberg, Poems from the Floating World, vol. 1, inside front cover; this passage is in quotation marks in the original. 34. Wright, Collected Poems, 129. 35. Bly, Silence in the Snowy Fields, 20. 36. Wright, Collected Poems, 111. 37. Lawrence, Complete Poems, 683. 38. Wright, Collected Poems, 135. 39. Bly, American Poetry, 7–32. 40. Ibid., 33. 41. Ibid., 50. 42. Bly, Lorca & Jiménez, 100.

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notes to pages 83–84

43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 2. 45. Gioia, Can Poetry Matter, 172. 46. Rothenberg, Pre-Faces, 54. 47. Bly, Lorca & Jiménez, 110–11. 48. Tate, Selected Poems, 156–57. 49. Rasula, “Deep Image,” 43. 50. Paul Breslin, Psycho-Political Muse, 125. 51. See Levine, “Poet in New York in Detroit” and Antolín Lagunilla, “La influencia de Federico García Lorca.” CHAPTER 5

1. Fass, Robert Creeley, 116–17; Creeley and Olson, Complete Correspondence, 174. Creeley’s poem first appeared in book form in For Love, 27. 2. Creeley later lived in Guatemala for a brief period, but he never developed a particularly strong interest in Spanish or Spanish-American poetry. 3. Creeley produced another poem by a strikingly similar procedure: “A poem in For Love called ‘After Mallarmé’ is actually a translation of a poem of Jouvet’s which Guston quoted to me, having brought me up to his loft, with characteristic kindness, to show me the few paintings still there just previous to his first show with Sidney Janis. My ‘translation’ is what I could make of the French he quoted, in my scattered recollection of it” (Creeley, Collected Essays, 373–74). I am indebted to Ben Friedlander for this reference. 4. In a reading given fairly late in his life, Creeley retells the story of this poem, claiming that it was a poem improvised by Lorca for an impromptu poetry contest, which did not survive except in transmission from M. Martí to Creeley himself. Creeley also lists Catalan and Provençal (somewhat improbably) as languages through which this poem was transmitted. Creeley, reading the poem “After Lorca” on Youtube (electronic source). 5. Machado y Álvarez, Cantes flamencos, 178. 6. If Martí really was a friend of Lorca, he might have remembered Lorca singing or reciting the flamenco lyric and misremembered it as a poem by Lorca; or else Lorca could have composed a parodic version of this lyric, which Martí remembered. 7. Aside from the review of Voznesensky discussed in chapter 2, Creeley also interwove the Spanish text of Lorca’s poem “La soleá” in the final section of a collaboration with the Venezuelan artist Marisol [Escobar] (Creeley and Marisol, Presences, no pagination; reprinted in Creeley, Collected Prose of Robert Creeley, 373–74) For a discussion of this incorporation of Lorca’s text, see Fredman, Poet’s Prose, 83–84. Creeley uses the same poem as the epigraph to his short story “The Death” (Collected Prose of Robert Creeley, 27). 8. Ellingham and Killian, Poet Be Like God, 80–81. 9. Ibid., 80. 10. Spicer, Collected Books, 11. Abbreviated henceforward as Spicer, CB. 11. Spicer, CB, 32. In his fourth letter to Lorca, Spicer explains this practice of addressing each poem to an individual: “The person you love is always interested because he knows that the poems are always about him [...] I may not be a better poet when I am in love,

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but I am a far less frustrated one. My poems have an audience” (CB, 38–39). What he does not mention is that Lorca himself was in the habit of dedicating his poems. Each poem in the Romancero gitano has a separate dedicatee, and many poems from other books follow this practice. 12. Chamberlain, “Ghostwriting the Text,” 428. 13. Ibid, 429. 14. Spicer labels all six of his translations from Diván del Tamarit as ballads, although in Lorca’s original work they are identified with the Arabic genres casida and gacela. He also uses the word ballad for a few of his apocryphal translations. 15. Spicer, House that Jack Built, 138. 16. Spicer, CB, 25. 17. Eshleman, “The Lorca Working,” 38. 18. Spicer, CB, 21–22. 19. Translators who attempt to fulfill more conventional standards of accuracy often unintentionally produce “translation effects” that are as odd as those of Spicer, but that are much less poetically effective. Alan S. Trueblood translates the first line of “Suicidio” as “The lad was going blank” (García Lorca, Collected Poems, 491). 20. Spicer, CB, 50. The “13 empty boats” in this poem is an allusion to the phrase “un sueño de trece barcos” [“a dream of thirteen boats”] from Lorca’s “El emplazado” (García Lorca, Collected Poems, 558–59). 21. Eshleman, “Lorca Working,” 43. 22. Spicer, CB, 26. 23. Ibid., 37. 24. Eshleman, “Lorca Working,” 41. 25. Garcia Lorca, Selected Poems, ed. Donald Allen and Francisco García Lorca, 10–12. 26. Spicer, CB, 41. 27. Garcia Lorca, Selected Poems, 11–13. 28. “The Moon and Lady Death” (Spicer, CB, 49) is also a translation of a weaker text from Lorca’s Libro de poemas. Spicer’s “improvement” of this text is somewhat less successful, though. 29. Spicer, CB, 11. 30. Ibid., 305. Another complication is the material from the Lorca project that Spicer chose not to include in After Lorca. My conclusion, after looking at some of this material, is that it consists mostly of original Spicer poems, along with a translation of Romance sonámbulo. I am indebted to Kevin Killian for showing me some of this material, from the Bancroft library at the University of Califorina, Berkelely. 31. Spicer, CB, 16. 32. Spicer, House that Jack Built, 135–36. 33. The metaphor of the radio was inspired by Jean Cocteau’s 1950 movie “Orphée,” in which Orpheus receives coded messages from a car radio. 34. Spicer, House that Jack Built, 138. 35. Spicer, CB, 281. 36. Ibid., 356.

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notes to pages 107–117

37. Ibid., 356–57. 38. Ibid., 434. 39. Spicer, House that Jack Built, 139. 40. Ellingham and Killian, Poet Be Like God, 81. 41. Ibid., 102. 42. Ibid., 64–66. CHAPTER 6

1. Ashbery, Schuyler, and Guest are more distant from Lorca, and from Spanishlanguage poetry generally, than are Koch and O’Hara. Guest writes an homage to Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic with the title “All Elegies Are Black and White” (Poems, 78–80), and “Barrels,” a poem based on some lines from César Vallejo (Blue Stairs, 24–25). In her later years, Guest identified strongly with the surrealist movement, but looked to French rather than Spanish models. 2. The extent to which Lorca’s own poetry is actually “surrealist” is, of course, a matter for debate. Since most American readers assume that Poeta en Nueva York is a surrealist book, I will use the term in accordance with conventional usage, with the caveats expressed in chapter 1. 3. Perloff, Frank O’Hara, 67. 4. This was one of the first major U.S. exhibitions devoted exclusively to Spanish art of this period, following close on the heels of the Guggenheim Spanish show in June 1960. O’Hara’s catalogue reveals a level of expertise in Spanish art beyond the modernist canon of Dalí, Picasso, Gris, and Miró. He attributed the vitality of contemporary Spanish art to “the desire to provide their society with values which are neither antiquated, chauvinistic, nor sentimental” (O’Hara, New Spanish Painting, 7). It is difficult to imagine the typically generous O’Hara condescending to a major painter like Antoni Tàpies, but Gooch reports that he spoke of the Spanish artists in a disparaging manner: “It’s very hard for me to deal with sensibilities that are lesser than my own” (Gooch, City Poet, 356–57). 5. O’Hara, Standing Still and Walking, 31. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 177. 8. Ibid., 176. 9. Gooch makes note of a certain ambivalence toward Motherwell, a painter not highly rated in O’Hara’s “downtown” circles, and notes a similarity in tone between O’Hara’s writing about Motherwell and the “Little Elegy for Antonio Machado,” which I will discuss below (Gooch, City Poet, 447). Russell Ferguson also perceives a link between O’Hara’s interest in Motherwell and in Machado: “Frank O’Hara’s last poem, the ‘Little Elegy for Antonio Machado’ (1966), written for the catalogue of a benefit exhibition to aid refugees from Franco, makes a direct connection with Motherwell’s Elegy for the Spanish Republic, which O’Hara deeply admired. He made the connection clear by sending a copy of the poem to Motherwell” (Ferguson, In Memory of My Feelings, 123). Edward Hirsch uses a Motherwell image from the Elegy series for the cover of The Demon and the Angel, his book about the duende and artistic inspiration, and provides some

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helpful information about the series in a chapter with the title “Motherwell’s Black” (Hirsch, Demon and the Angel, 184–90). 10. Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems, 491. Abbreviated hereafter as O’Hara, CP. 11. To the best of my knowledge, Machado is the only Spanish poet other than Lorca to appear in O’Hara’s writing (aside from the mention of a few Catalan writers of the Dau al set group in the New Spanish Painting and Sculpture catalogue). Nevertheless, his poem for Machado seems motivated more by the circumstances surrounding his escape from Spain and subsequent death than by an actual engagement with Machado’s poetry. O’Hara did not read Spanish, and only a few editions of Machado’s poetry were available in English translation at the time. The question of why O’Hara wrote this poem, then, remains unanswered. 12. O’Hara wrote at least three poems about James Dean: “For James Dean” (CP, 228–30), “Thinking of James Dean” (CP, 230–31), and “Four Little Elegies” (CP, 248–52). His elegy for Billie Holiday, “The Day Lady Died” (CP, 325), is one of his best-known poems. 13. O’Hara, Robert Motherwell, 10. 14. Awake in Spain is a short comic play featuring numerous characters, including a “Flamenco Dancer” and Francisco Franco himself (O’Hara, Selected Plays, 95–114). 15. O’Hara, CP, 274. 16. At the risk of overintepreting: a pianola is a piano equipped to play a piano roll. Thus to sit down at such an instrument is redundant. The piano will play what it is programmed to play. Hence: a stylistic repetition, the risk of self-parody. Even O’Hara’s most casual mode is subject to exegesis, packing in as much meaning per line as the clotted symbolism of Robert Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle. 17. Epstein, Beautiful Enemies, 93–94. 18. O’Hara, CP, 252–53. 19. O’Hara, Poems Retrieved, 193–94. Donald Allen notes that there is a musical setting of this poem by composer Peter Hartman in the collection of the library of Indiana University. 20. García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Simon and White, 116–17. 21. Ibid., 118–19. 22. García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Belitt, 91. 23. “Aus Einem April” (O’Hara, CP, 186), echoes Rilke’s “Aus einer Kindheit.” “A True Acount of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island” (CP, 306–7) is based on Mayakovsy’s “An Extraordinary Adventure.” 24. O’Hara, CP, 258. 25. Gooch, City Poet, 261. O’Hara’s comparison of France to a “rhinestone dog-collar” suggests an ironic, campy image, suggesting something gaudy, incongruous, and worn in jest. 26. In an interview with David Kennedy, Koch mentions the literary influences he shares with New York school poets as French poetry from Nerval onward, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Rilke, Lorca, Williams, and Stevens (Koch, “An Interview”). 27. Perloff, Frank O’Hara, 67. 28. Ibid., 67–68. Perloff demonstrates convincingly that “Easter” resembles the catalogue poems of Benjamin Péret and Tristan Tzara (65–66). Such an influence is in no way incompatible with my intuition that O’Hara could have been thinking of Lorca as well. I cannot

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notes to pages 125–134

discount a certain confirmatory bias in my linking of certain O’Hara poems to a Lorcaesque mode. 29. O’Hara, CP, 97, 99. 30. O’Hara, CP, 97. 31. García Lorca, Poeta en Nueva York, trans. Simon and White, 58. 32. I have attempted my own translation here in order to try to give some flavor of O’Hara’s own poetic style. 33. O’Hara, CP, 117. 34. Gooch, City Poet, 225. 35. “Critics have generally been unreceptive to this poem [“Easter”], calling it ‘messy,’ ‘strident,’ ‘bombastic,’ and ‘formless’” (Perloff, Frank O’Hara, 65). 36. O’Hara, CP, vii–viii. 37. Perloff, Frank O’Hara, 120 et passim. 38. Gooch, City Poet, 227. 39. O’Hara, Collected Poems, 305. 40. Bellamy, American Poetry Observed, 65. 41. Carnero, et al. “Preguntas sobre Federico García Lorca,” 5. 42. O’Hara, CP, 468. 43. García Lorca, Collected Poems, 554–55. CHAPTER 7

1. Koch, Collected Poems, 123. 2. Koch, On the Edge, 405. 3. Shapiro, “A Conversation with Kenneth Koch” (electronic source). 4. This is what I have called, only half facetiously, “Mayhew’s First Law of Lorca”: If an American poet is interested in one, and only one, Spanish poet, that poet will be Lorca. 5. Shapiro, “A Conversation with Kenneth Koch” (electronic source). Ron Padgett places Koch’s rejection of a certain kind of complexity in the context of his European literary influences: “Koch had no use for the allusive obscurity that was rampant in American poetry in the 1940s and 50s. At various times he preferred the sensuousness of Keats, the dark lyricism of Lorca, the energy of Mayakovsky, the daring of Stein, the exalted depth of Rilke” (Koch, Kenneth Koch, xvii–xviii; emphasis added). 6. Koch does use a particular variety of irony, that other staple of the New Criticism, but in a way that makes him less, not more, susceptible to academic treatments. The humorous tone of his poetry undoubtedly led him to be treated less seriously than his contemporaries. Koch himself, interestingly, saw humor as a path to ecstatic exuberance rather than as a lack of seriousness. 7. Koch, Collected Poems, 5. 8. Koch, Art of Poetry, 36–37. 9. Ibid., 37. 10. Koch, Pleasures of Peace, 49–63. 11. That these poets are apocryphal is evident in Koch’s use of names that are not found in the Hispanic world, some of which do not follow the norms of Spanish phonology.

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Guinhieme is suggestive of Guillén (the surname of two prominent Hispanic poets, Jorge and Nicolás), but uses the Portuguese spelling nh in place of ñ. The names Jorge Guiells, Guilha, and Calliens also appear in the text of “Some South American Poets,” suggesting that Koch was in fact thinking of Jorge Guillén. Santorje combines Santos with Jorge. Gomero and Juanero combine Gómez and Juan, respectively, with the common suffix -ero. Omero is phonetically identical to Homero, the Spanish version of the name Homer. Into this mix of improbable names Koch introduces Juan, Luis, and García, the most common surname in Spain, and the paternal surname of Federico García Lorca himself. 12. 199; emphasis in original. 13. Ibid. 14. García Lorca, Poet in New York (trans. Belitt), 154. I quote from the Ben Belitt translation that Davis uses in his unpublished essay on Koch’s South American poets, since this is probably the version that Koch himself used. Davis elaborates on the possible connections and differences between hasos and duende as follows: “While there are similarities, the statements of Guinhieme and Lorca have just as much kinship with each other as they do with the celebrated remark of Emily Dickinson: ‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’ [. . .] Duende is fundamentally death-obsessed, if not morbid [. . .] Hasos, on the other hand, is built upon the apparently ordinary but profoundly myste­rious capacity of mankind for denial, muting, and forgetting.” Davis also speculates that “Some South American Poets” may have been inspired by an homage to Miguel Hernández that appeared in Robert Bly’s magazine The Sixties in 1967. Since Davis’s essay is unpublished, I quote from a version that he was kind enough to share with me. 15. Koch, Collected Poems, 199. 16. García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Belitt, 157. 17. A second essay, “Reflections on ‘Hasosimo’” by “Omero Pecad,” extracted from “STUDIES FOR A LEFTIST UNIVERSITY” contests Guinhieme’s views: “Guinhieme’s ‘hasosimo’ is no more the pure form that appeared in Lope than is Guilha’s ‘structured license.’ Neither author has bothered to do his scholarship well” (Koch, Collected Poems, 202). Lope, of course, suggests the seventeenth-century Spanish playwright Lope de Vega, and by implication the value of the literary tradition. 18. Koch, Collected Poems, 200. 19. One early poem by Borges does appear, however, in Rothenberg’s Poems from the Floating World. 20. Gibson, Federico García Lorca, 372. 21. Jordan Davis, introduction to Some South American Poets (unpublished manuscript). 22. Borges, Ficciones, 15. 23. Koch, Collected Poems, 203. 24. Koch, Collected Poems, 194. The rural police force known as the guardia civil, known for its right-wing tendencies and its hostility to the gypsies, appears in several Lorca poems, most notably in Romancero gitano. The Andalusian city Sevilla also appears frequently in his work. Lorca was one of the first victims of the military rebellion initiated by Francisco Franco. 25. Koch, Collected Poems, 198. Dollar in Spanish is dólar, not the Spanglish dollaro.

200 

notes to pages 148–152

26. García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Belitt, 58–59. For more examples of Belitt’s style see chapter 3. 27. Koch, Collected Poems, 203, 197. 28.. Ibid., 85. 29. Ibid., 197. 30. Jordan Davis associates “Some South American Poets” with the genre of the hoax. I do not believe that it would fool astute readers, or that its primary intention is deceptive. It is hard to know, however, what most readers would have made of this text in 1969. When I first read this work myself I was rather slow in realizing that the poets translated were apocryphal creations. It was only when I began looking up the poets one by one in the card catalogue of a local university library that I realized what was going on. In my defense I can only say that I was fifteen years old at the time and had not yet started to study Spanish. 31. Koch, Art of Poetry, 202. 32. Koch, Collected Poems, 498. 33. Koch, Art of Poetry, 202. Koch’s remarkable contribution to the field of education is significant for his own poetics as well. My sense is that the scope of Koch’s achievement can only be appreciated through a reading of his work in multiple genres: lyric, epic, didactic, and dramatic poetry, fiction, and pedagogic prose. 34. Three of these titles allude, incidentally, to poems by Frank O’Hara. Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (1970) and I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing in a Nursing Home (1978) do not contain literary models for imitation—only the poems written by Koch’s students. 35. While surrealist automatic writing might have provided the basis for a “poetry idea,” the Francophone writers selected by Koch for this book are Apollinaire, Rimbaud, and Senghor—not Breton or any other member of the original surrealist movement. No other Spanish-language poet aside from Lorca is included. 36. Koch, Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? 133–34. 37. Ibid., 140. 38. Ibid., 142. 39. Poems in English by British and American authors undergo a similar transformation, so this process of translation can be intralingual as well as interlingual. 40. Eco, The Open Work, 197. 41. Linda Hutcheon’s 1985 A Theory of Parody remains a useful guide to the definition of the genre. She does not see the intent to ridicule as essential to parody in the twentieth century. Although Hutcheon does not consider Koch in this book, his entire poetic production would provide many examples supporting her theories, from his mock epics and comic variations on Noh theater to his parody of Horatian didacticism in The Art of Love. 42. Koch and Farrell, Sleeping on the Wing, 211. CHAPTER 8

1. Picasso, Burial of the Count. 2. Rothenberg, Lorca Variations, 88. This work will be abbreviated henceforth as Rothenberg, LV. The more common term, of course, is cante jondo, as in Lorca’s own title Poema del

notes to pages 152–161 

201

cante jondo. The Spanish word hondo has a silent aitch, so jondo is a phonetic representation of the aspirated aitch of Andalusian pronunciation. 3. Rothenberg, LV, 90. 4. Since the translation of Poeta en Nueva York by Simon and White was published separately by Farrar Straus Giroux, with an introduction by Maurer, the Lorca that dominates the Collected Poems as a whole is the author of elegant song-like lyrics. The early Lorca of Libro de poemas, Poema del cante jondo, Suites, and Canciones stretches to page 513, even though Libro de poemas does not appear in its entirety. The revised 2002 version of the Collected Poems reincorporates the Simon/White Poeta en Nueva York and thus shifts the emphasis somewhat to Lorca’s later poetry. Rothenberg also published his translation of the Suites separately with Green Integer in 2001, omitting the Spanish text. 5. García Lorca, Collected Poems, v–vi. 6. Dinverno, “García Lorca’s Suites,” 303. 7. Ibid., 308. 8. Ibid., 309. 9. Ibid., 319. Dinverno mentions scholars such as Donald Reiman and Hans Zeller in connection with this term. 10. Rothenberg, LV, 89. 11. Ibid., 1. 12. Ibid., 27. 13. García Lorca, Collected Poems, 311–13. 14. I could also compare Rothenberg’s translations to Lorca’s original poems. His free adaptations of his own translations, however, inevitably take us further away from Lorca’s originals. 15. Rothenberg, LV, 47. 16. García Lorca, Collected Poems, 249. 17. Rothenberg, LV, 16. 18. García Lorca, Collected Poems, 279–81. The final stanza of Rothenberg’s translation obscures a relatively straightforward metaphor: “Por el aire, / el ruiseñor, / corazón del árbol” [In the air, / the nightingale, / heart of the tree]. The nightingale, in other words, is the heart of the tree. By making nightingales plural, and interposing the word aloft, the translator overlooks the effect Lorca achieves with the juxtaposition of “ruiseñor / corazón.” I have chosen not to quibble further with Rothenberg’s versions of the Suites, since such criticism could easily become tedious and counterproductive. 19. Rothenberg, LV, 75. 20. García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Simon and White, 136–41. 21. Glass, “‘El cementerio judío’”; Nordlund, “‘Cementerio judío.’” 22. Simon and White translate this as “the way lettuce grows slowly from its center” (García Lorca, Poet in New York, 136–37), Belitt as “with the frozen reserve of a lettuce-leaf ” (García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Belitt, 105). 23. Rothenberg, LV, 75. 24. Ibid., 77. 25. Rothenberg’s 2007 Triptych collects three of his previously published Jewish cycles: Poland: 1931; Khurbn; and The Burning Babe. 202 

notes to pages 161–171

26. García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Simon and White, 217. The translation of these letters is by Christopher Maurer. 27. Borges’s short story is often interpreted as leading to the conclusion that the reader is the creator of his or her own text, that the act of reading is an act of making meaning. My interpretation of the story (which is possibly too literal-minded) is that the reader creates meaning by positing an author figure with a certain worldview. Thus if the Quijote is read as the product of a late-symbolist French poet like Pierre Menard, certain interpretative consequences inevitably follow. This effect can be seen, I believe, in certain biographical interpretations of Lorca’s work. Since we know that Lorca is gay, the “Oda Walt Whitman” must be read (erroneously to my mind) as a poem anticipating gay liberation, despite its horrific imprecations against the “maricas de todo el mundo.” 28. A reading of The Lorca Variations without reference to its source text is also possible, but it is not possible for me, given the critical project in which I am engaged. 29. Rothenberg, LV, 89. 30. Ibid. 31. García Lorca, Collected Poems, 167. CONCLUSION

1. Rothenberg, Pre-Faces, 63. 2. Spicer, Collected Books, 12.

notes to pages 172–178 

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———. The House That Jack Built. The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. Edited by Peter Gizzi. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. St. Martin, Hardie, ed. Roots & Wings: Poetry From Spain, 1900–1970. New York: Harper Row, 1976. Szwed, John. So What: The Life of Miles Davis. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. Tate, James. Selected Poems. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991. Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Toward an Ethics of Difference. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. ———. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Von Eschen, Penny M. Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Voznesensky, Andrei. Selected Poems. Translated by Anselm Hollo. New York: Grove Press, 1964. Wakoski, Diane. Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962–1987. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1988. Waldman, Anne, and Andrew Schelling, eds. Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Williams, William Carlos. The Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1955. Wright, James. The Branch Will Not Break. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1963. ———. Collected Poems. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971. ———. A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright. Edited by Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Maley. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005. Young, Howard. “La primera recepción de Federico García Lorca en los Estados Unidos (1931–1941).” In América en un poeta, edited by Anderson, 105–18. II. Electronic Sources

Asociación para la recuperación de la memoria histórica. Home page. http://www .memoriahistorica.org. Creeley, Robert. Reading of the poem “After Lorca” on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=nkg0no4nieI. Crumb, George. Home page of George Crumb. “Song, Drones, and Refrains of Death.” http://www.georgecrumb.net/comp/songs-p.html. De Lisle, Tim. “Who Held a Gun to Leonard Cohen’s Head.” The Guardian. September 17, 2004. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/fridayreview/story/0,,1305765,00.html. Koch, Kenneth. “An Interview with Kenneth Koch.” http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/ koch.html. Poetry Society of America. “What’s American About American Poetry?” http://www .poetrysociety.org/waqna.html. Shapiro, David. “A Conversation with Kenneth Koch.” Jacket 15 (2001). http://jacketmagazine .com/15/koch-shapiro.html.

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213

Index

abstract expressionism, 28, 34 African American poets, 27, 33–41. See also Baraka, Amiri (Leroi James); Hughes, Langston; Kaufman, Bob; Mackey, Nathaniel Aiken, Conrad, xi Alarcón, Francisco X, 189n64 Alberti, Rafael, 10, 57, 82–83, 184n24 Aleixandre, Vicente, 18–19, 82, 88, 100–101, 184n24 Allen, Donald M., 125, 198n19; The New American Poetry, xiv, 24, 46, 81, 183n3; The Poetics of the New American Poetry, 149; Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, 55, 59–63, 106, 162 Alonso, Dámaso, 13, 29 Altolaguirre, Manuel, 57 American exceptionalism, nationalism. See cultural exceptionalism (nationalism), American Ammons, A. A., 193n14 Andalusia, 2–3, 10, 17, 25, 48, 150, 200n24 Anderson, Andrew A., 185n24, 185n42, 186n45, 189n54 Anderson, Sherwood, 194n29 Antin, David, 81, 87, 193nn15–16 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 124, 143, 146, 201n35 Argentina (Buenos Aires), 17, 149–50. See also Borges, Jorge Luis

Armstrong, Louis, 33 Ashbery, John, 122, 145, 155, 156, 197n1 Attucks, Crispus, 38–39 Auden, W. H., 26, 81, 95, 102, 133, 143, 145, 155 Baez, Joan (Baptism), 26 Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones), 46, 59, 173, 179; “Lines for Garcia Lorca,” 34–35 Barthelme, Donald, 107 Baudelaire, Charles, 124, 143 Beat Generation, 26, 37, 81. See also Ginsberg, Allen; Kaufman, Bob Beckett, Samuel, 107 Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo, 10 Belamich, André, 163 Belitt, Ben, xi; Adam’s Dream, 68; as translator of Poeta en Nueva York, 27, 38, 39–40, 50, 54, 55, 59, 63–69, 74–77, 97, 106, 132, 151–52 Beloit Poetry Review, 57 Benavente, Jacinto, 10 Benjamin, Walter, 11–12 Berea, Arturo, 57 Bergamín, José, 16 Berkeley (San Francisco) Renaissance, 26, 106, 121. See also Blaser, Robin; Duncan, Robert; Spicer, Jack Bernstein, Charles, 49 Berrigan, Ted, 102 215

Berryman, John, 26 Bishop, Elizabeth, 93, 95 Blackburn, Paul, xiv, 22, 46, 95, 101, 162, 192n56; Lorca/Blackburn, 55, 69–74, 75, 178 Black Mountain School, 26, 70, 81, 87. See also Blackburn, Paul; Creeley, Robert; Olson, Charles; Pound-Williams tradition Blake, William, 156, 157 Blaser, Robin, 106, 114–17, 173 Bloom, Harold, 4, 180 Bloy, Léon, 4 Bly, Robert, xi, 50, 51, 55, 69, 87, 88, 99, 118, 122, 139–40, 142, 150, 155, 177, 194n29; as deep image poet, 79–83, 93; “Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River,” 91; The Fifties (The Sixties), 80, 96, 193n13, 200n14; Jiménez & Lorca, 25, 94, 100; “Looking for Dragon Smoke,” 94; Neruda & Vallejo, 100; as translator, 76, 93–97; Twenty Poems of Vicente Aleixandre, 100; “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry,” 93–94 Bonnefoy, Yves, 147 Borges, Jorge Luis, 4, 87, 104, 107, 150–51, 191n33, 200n19; Fervor de Buenos Aires, 151; “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” 203n8 Boston Massacre, 38 Breslin, James, 80 Breslin, Paul, 80, 99 Breton, André, 19–20, 82, 87, 143, 144, 146, 201n35 Brossa, Joan, 140 Brown, John, 38 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, xiii bullfighting, 2, 14 Buñuel, Luis, 14–15, 180; Le chien Andalou, 14 Burroughs, William, 37 Cage, John, 28, 178, 180 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 10 Campbell, Roy, xi, 162, 190n6, 191n33 Cano, José Luis, 34 Cantar del mío Cid, 25 cante jondo (flamenco), 14, 35, 24, 79, 161, 201n2 Carnero, Guillermo, 14–15

216 

index

Celan, Paul, 87 Cendrars, Blaise, 143 Cernuda, Luis, 19, 88 Cervantes, Miguel de, 10 Césaire, Aimé, 133, 138 Chamberlain, Lori, 107, 118–19 Chambers, Whittaker, 38 Char, René, 143 Charnon-Deutsch, Lou, 14 Chillida, Eduardo, 123 Chinese poetry, 87, 91 Chomsky, Noam, 192n2 CIA, 34 Cobb, Carl, 55 Cocteau, Jean (“Orphée”), 196n33 Codrescu, Andrei, 187n17 Cohen, Leonard, xi; “Take this Waltz,” 26 cold war, xii, 22–33 Coltrane, John, 36, 51 confessional poetry, 26, 186n12 Conover, Willis, 188n32 Covarrubias, Miguel, 57 Crane, Hart, 27, 44, 46; The Bridge, 44–45 Creeley, Robert, xi, xiii, xv, 32, 33, 46, 50, 69, 87, 95, 96, 101, 144, 175–76; “After Lorca,” xiii, 103–6; “After Mallarmé,” 195n3; Presences, 195n7 Crumb, George, 26, 187n13 cultural exceptionalism (nationalism), American, xiv, 24, 27–31, 34, 40, 141, 177 cultural exceptionalism (nationalism), Spanish, 29–31, 34 Custer, (General) George Armstrong, 38 Dalí, Salvador, 13–15, 19, 141, 161, 185n35 Damon, Maria, 37 Darío, Rubén, 10, 12, 19 Dau al set, 198n11 Davis, Jordan, 148, 150, 200n14, 201n30 Davis, Miles, 50, 51, 180; Kind of Blue (“Flamenco Sketches”), 36; Sketches of Spain, 27, 35–36 Dean, James, 126, 141, 198n12 deep image poetry, xv, 78–101, 175 Deguy, Michel, 143, 146–47

del Río, Ángel, 63, 185n30 Dewey, John, 28, 187n17 Dickinson, Emily, 178, 187n16, 200n14 Diego, Gerardo, 10 Dinverno, Melissa (“Federico García Lorca’s Suites and the Editorial Construction of Literature”), 163–64, 202n9 domestication (in translation), 22–24, 74–77 Donne, John, 156 Dreiser, Theodore, 194n29 Du Bouchet, André, 147 duende, xi, xiv, 1–3, 7, 14, 15, 24, 49–52, 63–64, 94, 106, 111, 123, 148–51, 175–76, 180–81, 200n14 Duncan, Robert, xi, xii, 20, 22, 45–46, 48, 86, 106, 118, 120, 144, 173, 175, 186n12; Caesar’s Gate, 45 Dylan, Bob, 26–27 Eco, Umberto, 158 Economou, George, 70 Edson, Russell, 99 Edward, Brent Hayes, 190n13 Eliot, T. S., 143, 145 Ellington, Duke, 28, 33 Ellison, Ralph, 28, 30, 34–35 Eluard, Paul, 134, 143 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 28, 30, 187n17 Epstein, Andrew, 129 Eshleman, Clayton, 78, 81, 146, 187n16; “The Lorca Working,” 107–8, 110–11, 115; “The Translator’s Ego,” 68–69 ethnopoetics. See Rothenberg, Jerome Evans, Gil (Sketches of Spain), 35 Falla, Manuel de, 35, 180 Farrell, Kate, 159 Federman, Raymond, 107 Feldman, Morton, 28 Ferguson, Russell, 197n9 Fernández Almagro, Melchor, 16 Fernández Cifuentes, Luis, 4–5 Finn, Huck (Mark Twain character), 50 flamenco, 27, 30, 34. See also cante jondo (flamenco)

folk music (American), 26–27 Foucault, Michel, 5–6, 7, 184n13, 184n17 Franco, Francisco, 6, 29, 32, 44, 120, 124, 153, 198n14, 200n24 Fredman, Stephen, 189n57, 192n47, 195n7 French poetry, 133, 143–47. See also Koch, Kenneth; O’Hara, Frank Friedlander, Ben, 195n3 Frost, Robert, 102 Fuentes, Carlos, 60 Gaceta de arte, 18 Gamoneda, Antonio, 180 García Lorca, Federico, 1–21; “Adelina de paseo,” 72; Así que pasen cinco años [Once five years pass], 7; “Balada de la Placeta” [Ballad of the little square], 111–14; Bodas de sangre [Blood wedding], 7, 12, 14, 36, 56; “Canción de jinete” [Song of the rider], 8; Canciones [Songs], 107; “Cantares populares” [Popular songs], 70–72; “La casada infiel” [The unfaithful wife], 8, 15; La casa de Bernarda Alba [The house of Bernarda Alba], 11; “Casida del llanto” [Qasida of weeping], 7; “Cementerio judío” [Jewish cemetery], 169–72; death of, 6; Diván del Tamarit [The Tamarit Diwan], 17, 108, 196n14; “Grito hacia Roma” [Scream toward Rome], 105; “Iglesia abandonada” [Abandoned church], 8; intellectual biography of, 8–14; “Juan Ramón Jiménez,” 96–97; “Juego y teoría del duende” [Play and theory of the duende], 2, 17, 48, 63–64, 78 (see also duende); Libro de poemas [Book of poems], 11, 107–8, 112, 196n28; “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” [Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías], 8, 62, 130, 143; El maleficio de la mariposa [The butterfly’s curse], 11; “El nacimiento de Cristo” [The birth of Christ], 65; “Norma y paraíso de los negros” [Norm and paradise of the blacks], 33, 38, 41; “Oda al santísimo sacramento” [Ode to the sacred sacrament], 105; “Oda a Walt Whitman” [Ode to Walt Whitman], 5, 30, 41–43, 48, 60, 89,

index 

217

García Lorca, Federico (cont.) 108, 120–21, 179; “Paisaje de la multitud que orina” [Landscape of the urinating mob], 135–36; “El paseo de Buster Keaton” [Buster Keaton’s ride], 107; “Pequeño Vals Vienés,” 26; Poema del cante jondo [Poem of the deep song], 11, 14, 15, 17, 108; Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York], 8, 14, 15, 17, 30, 89 (see also Belitt, Ben); El público [The audience], 7, 14; “El rey de Harlem” [The king of Harlem], 33, 60; Romancero gitano [Gyspy ballads], xv, 8, 9, 15–16, 55–72, 84, 108, 155, 156; Ruina [Ruin], 132; Sonetos del amor oscuro [Sonnets of dark love], 20; Suicidio [Suicide], 108–9; Suites, 13, 20, 161–72, 202n18; Teatro inédito de juventud [Unpublished theater of youth], 12–13; “Thamar y Amnon,” 60–61; Three Tragedies, 25, 47; Yerma, 4, 45 García Lorca, Francisco (brother of Federico García Lorca), 4, 10, 56, 63 García Valdéz, Olvido, 180 Garcilaso de la Vega, 10 gay poets (and García Lorca), xiv, 41–46, 120–21. See also Duncan, Robert; Ginsberg, Allen; O’Hara, Frank; Spicer, Jack “Generation of 1927,” 184–85n24 genius, 1, 3, 13, 51, 180–81 Gibson, Ian, 4–6, 12–13 Gil de Biedma, Jaime, 95 Gili, J. L., 24, 189n67. See also Spender, Stephen: Spender-Gili translations of Lorca Gillespie, Dizzy, 33 Ginsberg, Allen, xi, xii, 20, 21, 26, 31, 32, 37, 46, 59, 101, 119, 120, 138, 173, 177, 179, 186n12; “Howl,” 137; “A Supermarket in California,” 43; “Van Gogh’s Ear,” 44 Gioia, Dana, 96 Glass, Elliot S., 170 Glauber, Robert H., 29 Gómez de la Serna, Ramón, 10 Góngora, Luis de, 3 Gooch, Brad, 197n9 Goodman, Benny, 33 Goya, Francisco de, 29 Granados, Enrique, 130 218 

index

Grant, Ulysses S., 40 Grass, Günther, 87 Grove Press, 31, 39, 59 Guardia Civil, 8, 152, 200n24 Guest, Barbara, 122, 197n1 Guillén, Jorge, 13, 16, 89, 95, 184n24, 193n18, 200n11; Cántico, 11 Guillén, Nicolás, 56, 200n11 Guston, Philip, 195n3 gypsies and gypsy culture, 2, 5, 9–10, 16–17. See also Andalusia; cante jondo (flamenco) Haines, John, 98 Hale, Nathan, 38–39 Hall, Donald, xi, 98, 193n10 Halpern, Nick, 193n10 Hamill, Sam, 187n16 Hardy, Thomas, 143 Hartman, Peter, 198n19 Hartnett, Michael, 55 hasos, hasosismo (Koch), 149, 151, 200n17 Havard, Robert, 55 Heimann, Moritz, 12 Hejinian, Lyn, 49 Hemingway, Ernest, 2, 30, 35; For Whom the Bell Tolls, 124 Hernández, Miguel, 89, 153, 154, 193n13, 200n14 Herrick, Robert, 156 Hirsch, Edward, xi; The Angel and the Muse, 51, 177, 197–98n9 Hiss, Alger, 38 Hitler, Adolf, 124, 170 Holiday, Billie, 51, 126, 141, 198n12 Hollo, Anselm, 31 Homer, 158 Honig, 25, 54, 60, 75, 97, 162, 190n6, 193n13; Federico García Lorca, 25, 60 Hoover, Paul (Postmodern American Poetry), 78–79, 82, 108 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 143 Horace, 147, 201n41 Howe, Susan, 49, 145 Hughes, Langston, xi, xii, xiv, 36; New Negro Poets U.S.A., 36; translation of Romancero gitano [Gypsy ballads], 25, 29, 54, 55–59, 63, 75, 162, 191n16

Hughes, Ted, xi, 56 Hugo, Victor, 10 Huidobro, Vicente, 87 Humphries, Rolfe, 25, 55, 56, 57, 190n6, 193n13 Hutcheon, Linda, 201n41 Ibsen, Henrik, 10 Ignatow, David, 98, 193n7 Ilie, Paul, 19 “intentional fallacy,” 7 Irving, Washington, 30 Jacob, Max, 99, 124, 143 James, William, 28 Jarrell, Randall, 93–95 jazz, 33–35. See also Coltrane, John; Davis, Miles; Holiday, Billie Jeffers, Robinson, 45 Jewish poets (and García Lorca), 46. See also Rothenberg, Jerome Jiménez, Juan Ramón, 89, 93, 95, 102, 150, 193n18 Jiménez, Rosario, 106 Jiménez Heffernan, Julián, 9 John of the Cross, Saint [San Juan de la Cruz], 87, 158 Jones, Leroi. See Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones) Joris, Pierre, 160 Jouve, Pierre Jean, 143 Jung, Karl, 192n2, 194n29 Justice, Donald, xi Kabir, 158 Kaladjian, Walter, 194n29 Kaufman, Bob, xi, 31, 32, 37–40, 48, 50, 59, 69, 175, 177 Keats, John (“negative capability”), 3, 5, 184n7, 199n5 Kelly, Robert, 78, 80, 93, 99, 193n15; The Alchemist to Mercury, 86; “Notes on the Deep Image,” 85–87 Kemp, Lysander, 60 Kennedy, John F., 23, 38 Kerouac, Jack, 37, 180 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 38

Kinnell, Galway, 80 Kirkland, Will, 55, 56, 57, 191n16 kitsch, 16, 49–52, 158–59 Knopf, 59 Koch, Kenneth, xi, xii, 26, 46, 49, 69, 101, 120, 133, 143–59, 175, 178, 186n12; “The Aesthetics of Lorca,” 155–56; The Art of Love, 147; The Duplications, 147; “Fresh Air,” 143; “Impressions of Africa,” 147; I Never Told Anyone, 201n34; Ko, 145, 147; Making Your Own Days, 156; The Pleasures of Peace, 147, 154; “Reflections on Morocco,” 147; Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?, 118, 156–57, 201n36; “Seasons on Earth,” 143; Sleeping on the Wing, 156, 159; “Some South American Poets,” xiii, 147–54; Sun Out, 146; Talking to the Sun, 156; Thank You and Other Poems, 145, 153; When the Sun Tries to Go On, 145; Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, 201n34 Ku Klux Klan, 38 Kuzma, Greg, 100 Lagunilla, Antolín, 195n51 Lakoff, George, 194n29 Lamantia, Philip, 87 language poetry, 174 Lardas, John, 28 Larkin, Philip, 102 Laughlin, James, 39, 59 Lawrence, D. H., 45, 92, 153 Lee, Robert E., 38 Levertov, Denise, xi, 46, 50, 102, 119, 193n14 Levine, Philip, xi, 46, 79, 100, 187n16 Levy, Herb, xiii Ley de Memoria Histórica [Law of historical memory], 6 Lima, Frank, xi, 49, 187n16 Lincoln, Abraham, 38 Lloyd, A. L. (Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter), 24, 162, 190n6, 193n13 Logan, William Bryant, 55 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 30 Longo, Teresa, 183n1 Lope de Vega, 10, 200n17 Lorca, Federico García. See García Lorca, Federico

index 

219

Lowell, Robert, 26, 28, 57, 81, 93; Lord Weary’s Castle, 198n16 Machado, Antonio, 10, 83, 97, 103, 141, 150, 193n13, 198n11. See also O’Hara, Frank: “Little Elegy for Antonio Machado” Machado y Álvarez, Antonio (folklorist; father of Antonio Machado), 105, 161 Mackey, Nathaniel, xi, 35–36, 50–51, 59 Magee, Michael, 187n17 Mailer, Norman, 28, 33 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 143 Manrique, Jorge, 10 Marisol (Marisol Escobar), 195n7 Martí, M. (friend of Robert Creeley), 103–6, 195n4, 195n6 Martínez Nadal, Rafael, 179, 185n30 Masters, Edgar Lee, 194n29 Mathews, Harry, 107 Maurer, Christopher (The Collected Poems of Federico García Lorca), 60, 75, 76, 161–63, 202n4 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 44, 133, 138, 143, 198n23, 198n26, 199n5 McCarthy, Joseph, and McCarthyism, 38, 44. See also cold war McClure, Michael, xi, 46, 50, 177 Medina, Pablo, 190n9 Medina/Statman translation, 190n9 Merwin, W. S., 59, 60, 75, 80, 101, 108, 120, 150, 193n7 Mestre, Juan Carlos, 183n5 Miró, Joan, 19 modernismo (Spanish-American), 112 Monk, Thelonious, 180 Montesinos, J. F., 185n30 Moody, William Vaughn, 155 Morales, Mayra, 157 Morley, Hilda, xi, 50, 177; “Cante jondo,” 47–48; “Duende,” 47 Morris, C. B., 183n3, 184n9 Motherwell, Robert (“Elegy for the Spanish Republic”), 124, 130, 197n9 multiculturalism, 27 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 123, 124 Mussolini, Benito, 124 220 

index

Neruda, Pablo, 18, 82, 87–88, 93, 100–101, 122, 138, 150, 151, 153, 183n1 Nerval, Gérard de, 143, 198n26 New Criticism, 145 New Directions, 25, 59–60 New York School poets, 81, 197n1. See also Koch, Kenneth; O’Hara, Frank Nichol, bp, 107 Niedecker, Lorine, 69 Nietzche, Friedrich, 14 Noh theater, 133 Nordlund, David, 170 O’Hara, Frank, xi, xii, xv, 20, 21, 28, 33, 44, 59, 69, 119, 120–21, 122–42, 155, 175, 177, 201n34; “Answer to Voznesensky and Evtushenko,” 141; “Autobiographical Fragments,” 124; Awake in Spain, 127, 198n14; “The Day Lady Died,” 198n12; “Easter,” 132–38, 145, 199n35; “Failures of Spring,” 127–30; “Hatred,” 132–38; “Having a Coke with You,” 127; “In Memory of My Feelings,” 129–30; “Little Elegy for Antonio Machado,” 125–26, 131, 143; Lunch Poems, 136; New Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 197n4; “Now That I am in Madrid and Can Think,” 127; “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets,” 138–39; “Oranges,” 138, 145; “Personal Poem,” 134; Poems Retrieved, 150; “Second Avenue,” 145; “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island,” 198n23; “Young Girl in Pursuit of Lorca,” 130–32, 152 Olson, Charles, 28, 46, 86, 95, 103 Onís, Harriet de, 60 Oppen, George, 95 orientalism, 16, 127–30 Orr, Gregory, 100 Oteiza, Jorge, 123 Padgett, Ron, 199n5 Parker, Charlie, 35 parody, 110, 147–57, 159 Parsons, Betty, 137 Partisan Review, 24 Pasternak, Boris, 133, 143, 198n26 pastiche, 175

Paz, Octavio, 18, 122 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 28 Péret, Benjamin, 198n28 Pérez Galdós, Benito, 10 Perloff, Marjorie, xii, 134, 193n14, 198n28 Perse, St. John, 143 Picasso, Pablo (“Guernica”), 124 Pirandello, Luigi, 10 Plath, Sylvia, 26, 51, 82 Pollock, Jackson, 27, 50, 51 Pound, Ezra, xii, 95, 153; Cathay, 57; “The Seafarer,” 57 Pound-Williams tradition, 62, 69, 73–74, 95, 169 Prados, Emilio, 184n24 Proust, Marcel, 50 Quasimodo, Salvatore, 93 Rasula, Jed (“Deep Image”), 80–83, 193n13 Reiman, Donald, 202n9 Residencia de Estudiantes (Madrid), 10 Residencia de Estudiantes, 10 Reverdy, Pierre, 90, 92, 124, 143, 146 Rexroth, Kenneth, xi Reyes, Barbara Jane, xi Rich, Adrienne, 102 Rilke, Ranier Maria, xi, 93, 124, 133, 143, 158, 183n1, 193n13, 198n23, 198n26, 199n5; The Duino Elegies, 55; Sonnets to Orpheus, 55 Rimbaud, Arthur, xii, 143, 156, 157, 201n35 Rivers, Larry, 141 Rodríguez, Claudio, xv romanticism, 12, 31, 177, 186n12 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 38 Rorty, Richard, 187n18 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 38–39 Rosenthal, David H., 70 Rosset, Barney, 59 Rothenberg, Jerome, xi, 20, 25, 46, 69–70, 75, 99, 108, 118, 122, 144, 175, 178, 193n7; America, 160; and deep image poetry, 78–88, 92–94; and ethnopoetics, 160–61; “Lorca’s Spain,” 165; The Lorca Variations, xiii, 160–74, 175, 202n4, 202n18, 203n8; Poems for the Game of Silence, 165; Poems

for the Millennium, 160; Poems from the Floating World, 80, 87–88, 90; Shaking the Pumpkin, 101; Technicians of the Sacred, 101, 160; White Sun Black Sun, 80, 83–85, 153, 168, 193n11 Rothko, Mark, 180 Roussel, Raymond, 143, 144, 146, 153 Rumi, 158 Russell, Robert H., 4 Salinas, Pedro, 13, 89, 184n24 Saunders, Frances Stonor, 188n3 Schonberg, Jean-Louis, 6 Schuyler, James, 122, 197n1 Schwartz, Delmore, 155 Schwerner, Armand, 81 Segovia, Andrés, 35 Senghor, Léopold, 133, 201n35 Sexton, Anne, 26 Shakespeare, William, 10, 184n17 Shapiro, David, vii, xi, 46, 49, 145, 189n64 Shapiro, Karl, 93–95 Shelley, Percy Bysse, 144 Silliman, Ron, 49 Simic, Charles, 80, 99, 101 Simon, Greg, 63, 132, 202n4, 202n22 Simpson, Louis, 80 Smith, William Jay, xi Snodgrass, William, 26 Snyder, Gary, 87 Socrates, 14 Soria Olmedo, Andrés, 13, 15, 185n35 Sorrentino, Gilbert (Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things), 49–51 Soto de Rojas, Pedro, 3, 10 Soviet Union, 34, 124 Spanish Civil War, 6, 54, 123–24 Spender, Stephen, 24; Spender-Gili translations of Lorca, 57, 60–63, 67, 75, 113–14, 162, 179, 191n32, 193n13 Spicer, Jack, xi, xii, xv, 20, 45, 46, 50, 69, 77, 101, 122, 144, 165, 173, 175–76, 179; After Lorca, 106–21; “Afternoon,” 109–10; “Ballad of Sleeping Somewhere Else,” 110–11; “Ballad of the Seven Passages,” 110–11, 115; Book of Magazine Verse, 119; concept of

index 

221

Spicer, Jack (cont.) “dictation,” 115–17; Heads of Town up to the Aether, 119; Lament for the Makers, 119; Language, 119; “Poetry as Magic” workshop, 117–18; A Red Wheelbarrow, 119; “Song for September” (translation of “Balada de la placeta), 111–14, 115; “Suicide,” 108–9; “A Textbook of Poetry,” 117; translation of “Ode for Walt Whitman,” 120–21; Vancouver lectures, 119 Stafford, William, xi, 80, 98–99 Statman, Mark, 190n9 Stein, Gertrude, 199n5 Stepanchev, Stephen, 81 Stevens, Wallace, 95, 102, 124, 143, 156, 198n26 Strand, Mark, 79, 80, 99, 100, 101 St. Martin, Hardie, 100 Suárez, Antonio, 123 surrealism, xv, 2, 15, 18–20, 79, 87–89, 102, 133, 139, 144–47, 150 Szwed, John, 35–36 Tallman, Warren, 26 Tàpies, Antoni, 123, 197n4 Tarn, Nathaniel, 97 Tate, James, 80, 84, 100; “The Wheel Chair Butterfly,” 98–99 Theresa of Ávila, Saint (Santa Teresa de Ávila), 10 Thoreau, Henry David, 30 Trakl, Georg, 82–83, 93, 194n29 translation, 53–77; apocryphal, xiii, 179 (see also Creeley, Robert; Spicer, Jack); “postmodern poetics of,” 107; as translucent medium, 63 Transtromer, Thomas, 83 Troubadour poetry, 70, 73 Trueblood, Alan S., 196n19 Turner, Mark, 194n29 Tynan, Kenneth, 35, 50, 188n37 Tzara, Tristan, 198n28

222 

index

ultraísmo, 151 Valentino, Rudolph, 128 Valéry, Paul, 143 Valle-Inclán, Ramón de, 10, 19 Vallejo, César, 9, 19, 82–83, 89, 102, 107, 122, 194n29, 197n1 Venuti, Lawrence, 22–23, 58, 190n4 “versioning” (in textual editing), 164, 202n9 violence, 58, 62 Von Escher, Penny M., 188n32, 188n33 Voznesensky, Andrei, 31–33, 141, 195n7 Wakoski, Diane, xi, 47–48, 52, 80, 144, 187n16, 193n15 Walcott, Derek, 102 Walsh, John K., 68 Washington, George, 38, 44 Weinberger, Eliot, 68–69 White, Stephen, 63, 132, 202n4, 202n22 Whitman, Walt, 27, 30, 41–46, 48, 120, 134, 156 Williams, Merryn, 55 Williams, William Carlos, xi, 24–25, 27, 50, 51, 95, 102, 124, 137, 153, 156, 198n26. See also Pound-Williams tradition Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xii women poets (and García Lorca), 46–48 Wright, James, xi; “As I Step Over a Puddle at the End of Winter . . .,” 92; “A Blessing,” 92; as deep image poet, 80–83, 88–93, 97, 99, 142, 189n56; “Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry . . .,” 90; “Lying in a Hammock in William Duffy’s Farm . . .,” 90; “Trying to Pray,” 89–90 Yeats, William Butler, 4, 26, 102, 143, 145, 155 Young, Howard, 186n5, 186n11 Zeller, Hans, 202n9 Zen Buddhism, 27, 178 Zukofsky, Louis, 95